The Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act: Could It Pass in 2018?

In early 2018, the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act had cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee 16-5, but no one knew whether Majority Leader Mitch McConnell would let the full Senate vote on it. It never passed on its own. Many of its ideas did become law months later in the First Step Act. This post shows the debate as it looked at the time.

Update (October 2026): The Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act did not pass as its own bill. Many of its sentencing and prison changes, including retroactive crack cocaine relief, became law in the First Step Act of 2018, signed on December 21, 2018. See our First Step Act summary for the law as it stands today.

Could federal sentencing reform finally pass in 2018? With the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act, we thought maybe . . . just maybe.

Faced with the stark reality that the United States has the largest prison population in the world, Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, then chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, first introduced the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act in 2015. The committee approved it with support from both parties. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, without explanation, never brought it to the full Senate, which effectively killed it.

The bill came back in 2017 (S. 1917). On February 15, 2018, the Judiciary Committee approved it 16-5. All 10 Democrats on the committee voted yes, along with 6 Republicans. The 5 "no" votes were Republicans.

What would the bill do?

In 2018, nearly half of federal prisoners were serving time for drug crimes, not violent crimes. Many were low-level players in the drug trade. Most had no weapon during the offense and had minimal criminal records. Yet many were serving very long sentences. The original article reported that in 2012, the average federal drug sentence was 11.3 years.

The bill was designed to shrink the historically high U.S. prison population and curb very disproportionate federal sentences.

The bill had two halves: sentencing reform and prison reform.

Sentencing reform

A mandatory minimum is the lowest sentence a judge is allowed to give. The bill aimed to shrink the reach of these minimums so judges would have more say.

It also aimed to make the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 retroactive. That law cut the gap between crack and powder cocaine penalties. The old gap fell hardest on Black defendants, who were convicted of crack offenses in much higher numbers and received much longer sentences than people sentenced for powder. The original article noted that cocaine use was proportionally about equal among white and Black Americans. Making the 2010 law retroactive would end that injustice for people sentenced before it passed by letting them ask for a lower sentence. (Learn more about sentencing disparities.)

Prison reform

The bill required the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) to expand education and reentry programs. Reentry programs help people prepare to live and work after prison. Prison reform advocates of all stripes agree that people who have been locked up for long periods need these tools.

The Obama administration had started many prison reform and education programs for prisoners. In our view, the Trump administration did everything it could to undo them after taking office. The bill sought to put those Obama-era measures back in place permanently.

The question in 2018 was whether McConnell would bring the bill to the Senate floor, or kill it as he did in 2015.

The 2018 debate

The bill exposed splits among Republicans and inside the Trump administration.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions rose to prominence in law enforcement as a U.S. Attorney in the 1980s. His throwback "tough on crime" stance was at odds with current thinking on criminal justice. He refused to see mass incarceration as a mistake, pushed for heavier sentences in drug cases, and strongly opposed the bill. In a February 2018 letter to the committee, he said the bill "would reduce sentences for a highly dangerous cohort of criminals, including repeat dangerous drug traffickers and those who use firearms." That ignored the fact that about half of federal prisoners were drug offenders, many of them low-level players who had no weapon.

Senator Grassley, a strong ally of the administration, not only disagreed with Sessions but was personally offended by his stance.

White House adviser Jared Kushner also disagreed with Sessions. Kushner's father had served time for tax evasion, witness tampering, and illegal campaign contributions, and Kushner backed reform. He reached a compromise with Sessions to push only the prison-reform half of the bill at first.

Groups like Human Rights Watch and The Sentencing Project supported the bill. Both said it did not go far enough, but that it had important reforms that would make federal sentences reasonable and proportionate to the seriousness of the crime, and provide much-needed reentry help.

We hoped this bill, a first step toward helping people get out from under harsh and unfairly long federal sentences, would make it to the Senate floor. We look at the bill's six main changes here.

Facing a federal sentence? Book a consultation to talk it through with Brandon Sample.