As Congress continues to debate bipartisan legislation that would ease some federal prison sentencing guidelines, a White House official told Bold TV that the proposal’s major thrust is to prevent prisoners who served their time from re-entering. “Under this president’s leadership, we’ve committed to working with all walks in order to do something that create safer communities, make our criminal justice system fairer and then allowing people to get a second chance,” Ja’Ron Smith, special assistant to the President for Legislative Affairs, told Bold TV. “And so the heart of this legislation is about recidivism reduction. We know that almost 70 percent of the people who are in a federal prison system are repeat offenders, and we think in order to create safer communities, we need to reduce recidivism reduction [sic] while allowing to take it far enough, to take an individualized approach towards dealing with people’s risk, recidivism risk. So the First Step Act what it does is create some incentives that would encourage more people to participate in recidivism reduction programming, which we think will help create safer communities and give people second chances.” Smith said by focusing on non-violent criminals (who generally have better records of assimilating back…
See original post: White House Official on First Step Act: ‘Heart of This Legislation is About Recidivism Reduction’