Biden’s Criminal Justice Legacy

Four years ago, this article’s authors proposed an executive agenda for Biden that revolved around needed structural changes that would allow criminal justice reform not only to succeed in the moment but also to better withstand subsequent attacks. Most of their proposals could have been accomplished without Congress. In this piece, the authors evaluate the Biden administration’s actual performance on these measures and show that he and his Department of Justice scored almost uniformly poorly across the range of issues, which include charging and sentencing policies, clemency, compassionate release, corrections, the death penalty, and forensic science.