Will one man keep Americans locked up in prison?

Groups as disparate as the Center for American Progress and ACLU on the left and the Koch Brothers on the right; Republican Sen. Rand Paul and Democratic Sen. Cory Booker; and over two-thirds of the American people all support major overhauls to America’s criminal justice system. As do, presumably, the 2.2 million Americans ensnared in our nation’s costly and counterproductive current prison system. So what’s stopping reform? One man: Chuck Grassley.

Grassley is the senior Republican senator from Iowa. He was first elected to Congress in 1975, serving first in the House of Representatives before going to the Senate in 1981. That means Grassley’s been in Congress long enough to have been there when the idea of mandatory minimum sentences for federal criminal convictions was first introduced. In the 1980s, Congress passed so-called “mandatory minimums” as part of the national war on drugs, supposedly to make it easier to keep traffickers and kingpins locked up.

Yet by basically any measure, mandatory minimums have been a maximal failure.

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