The President’s proposed budget recycles the same failed policies that have devastated communities. The Attorney General recently requested that federal prosecutors charge the highest provable offenses.

These represent the application of excessive mandatory minimum sentences that have given us the largest prison population in the world. The racial disparity makes the numbers even starker when you look at the excessive overrepresentation of people of color. Black men are six times more likely than white men to be incarcerated. The President’s budget takes credit for the $1 billion in savings from smart on crime initiatives at the Department of Justice. Smarter and more fair criminal sentences are what has resulted in this drop. Instead of doing what we know works, this budget seeks to prioritize more incarceration and enforcement. The federal Bureau of Prisons peaked in 2013 at 219,300 and has decreased to approximately 188,500. These more than 30,000 people represent lives torn from communities: mothers, fathers, and sometimes even children. These numbers represent lost birthdays, anniversaries, little league games, and sometimes decades of productive years taken from young men and women.

Specific cuts included in the President’s budget:

• An increase of $200 million to “combat violent crime.” We have the world’s biggest prison population and declining rates of crime nationally. A further push of force in communities is not what we need. Part of this increase will fund new prosecutors to ask for sentences that are already enormously high when the level of prosecutors have increased dramatically since the 1980’s at the beginning of the “war on drugs.”
• Second Chance Act reentry programs reduced by $20 million or nearly 30 percent. The Second Chance Act funds a large number of reentry programs across the country and are authorized up to $160 million. The program spent less than $70 million in 2016. Reentry services are vital to ensuring that people reentering communities are afforded every opportunity to achieve in our society. Today returning citizens continue to face so many collateral consequences and barriers leading to crime like barriers to education or other barriers to opportunity like job training programs.
• Youth Mentoring is reduced by $31.8 million. The program provides vital services to at-risk youth. Mentoring and engaging with youth has been shown to reduce instances of drug use, aggression, and depression.

President Trump’s proposed budget promotes mass incarceration and ignores the root causes of crime: poverty, lack of opportunity, and excessive mandatory minimum sentences. Congress is the first branch of government with the power to spend. They need to ensure that we fund reentry programs like juvenile justice programs, second chance reentry grants, and other programs that fund human needs.