In the January 2025 issue of Reason, we’re giving performance reviews of Joe Biden’s presidency. Click here to read the other entries.
To win the Democratic primaries four years ago, Joe Biden had to take a left turn on criminal justice, offering voters a smorgasbord of reforms to a carceral system he had helped build over his decades as a tough-on-crime senator. As Biden’s presidency sputters to an end, the White House has made strides on some of those goals but failed to deliver on many others.
Biden’s voluminous 2020 criminal justice platform (now scrubbed from his website) advocated eliminating mandatory minimum sentences, cash bail, and the federal death penalty. It called for ending the “school-to-prison pipeline” and heavily investing in mental health counselors at schools and in juvenile justice programs that provide alternatives to incarceration. Biden also promised to use the Justice Department to investigate…
