Attorney General William Barr said Monday that the department had chosen the Hudson Institute, a conservative research group, to host an independent review committee to help law enforcement officials create tools to reduce recidivism and programs for prisoners to earn credits toward early release.
Critics noted that the attorney general was supposed to designate a committee host within 30 days of the passage of the law, the First Step Act, in late December.
But putting the law into practice quickly became complicated. The government partly shut down one day after Congress passed the bill and sent it to President Donald Trump to sign into law, and many of the Justice Department employees who would have worked to fulfill it went on furlough. The shutdown, the longest in history, lasted through the end of January.
That has given law enforcement officials just over two months to start carrying out a complicated piece of legislation, a senior Justice Department official said in defending their pace.
The legislation swept in the most substantial changes in a generation to sentencing laws that expanded the federal inmate population and created a criminal justice system that many conservatives and liberals viewed as both costly and unfair. The law expands job training and other efforts aimed at reducing recidivism rates, expands early-release programs and modifies sentencing laws.
“Understandably, there have been some gray areas that have needed to be interpreted, but overall, the implementation has been slow,” said Brett Tolman, a former U.S. attorney in Utah and an advocate for criminal justice reform. “It’s surprising because when the law was passed, it was very clear that the proponents of the legislation did not intend it to be delayed.”
The criminal justice overhaul was also passed during intense tumult at the top of the Justice Department, which oversees the Bureau of Prisons and would be responsible for carrying out much of the new legislation. In the weeks before the bill was passed, Trump forced Attorney General Jeff Sessions to resign and replaced him on an interim basis with Matthew Whitaker, Sessions’ chief of staff.
Democrats criticized the appointment, pointing to Whitaker’s lack of experience and questions about possible conflicts of interest, as well as whether Trump was installing a loyalist to oversee the end of the Russia investigation. By the time Trump signed the criminal justice legislation in late December, Trump had nominated Barr, leaving Whitaker with little influence to spearhead a new initiative.
Sessions, who has long held a tough-on-crime approach, opposed the criminal justice overhaul, and while he was attorney general and Whitaker his top aide, the Justice Department was seen as hostile to much of the bill, according to three people who worked on it but were not authorized to discuss confidential negotiations.
Sessions spent much of his career as a federal prosecutor and senator from Alabama pushing for harsher sentencing guidelines, and many of the sheriffs and the police who were his biggest supporters disliked the legislation. Sessions, who ordered prosecutors to pursue tough charges in criminal cases as one of his first major acts as attorney general, was seen as a roadblock to getting a deal done in Congress.
The legislation changed sentencing laws, prompting 800 sentencing reductions already, according to the Justice Department. Of that group, nearly 650 inmates have been released from prison.
Another 22 inmates have received sentencing reductions under a compassionate release program that is part of the law. In March, a federal judge in Houston ordered the Bureau of Prisons to give Richard Evans, 74, who has cancer, compassionate release under the law. Evans was 22 months into a five-year sentence for health care fraud.
Trump has touted the criminal justice overhaul as one of his major achievements, and he hosted a celebration this month at the White House to honor the legislation.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.