We post news and comment on federal criminal justice issues, focused primarily on trial and post-conviction matters, legislative initiatives, and sentencing issues.
‘WHAT THE PELL?’ – NO SENTENCE REFORM IN STIMULUS, BUT THERE’S COLLEGE MONEY AND CASH FOR INMATES
Remember all of the sentence reform bennies in last May’s HEROES Act, passed by the House? Forget about them.
The 5,593-page stimulus package passed by Congress and signed last night by President Trump had none of the changes to compassionate release, CARES Act home confinement or elderly offender home confinement included in HEROES. However, the bill does resume federal college financial aid to prison inmates – Pell grants – that was banned in the 1994 crime bill championed by then-Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr.
The measure was part of a bipartisan deal struck by House and Senate education leaders to address affordability and equity in higher education. Two years ago, leaders in both houses, as well as the education secretary, Betsy DeVos, agreed that the 1994 ban should be revisited. In 2015, President Barack Obama’s Education Department piloted an experimental program called “Second Chance Pell” that allowed 12,000 incarcerated students to be eligible for the financial aid for distance learning and other programs that required tuition. Secretary DeVos expanded the program and urged Congress to make it permanent.
The other curious feature – omission, perhaps – in the new stimulus package is this: after the uproar over inmates being eligible to receive the $1,200 stimulus payment in the CARES Act, there was no doubt that inmates would be cut out of any stimulus payment in the bill signed last night. But the legislation contains not a whisper that incarcerated people are exempt. Rather, it merely adopts the CARES Act eligibility requirement without change, meaning that inmates remain eligible for the stimulus payment, just like they were last spring.
The New York Times, Financial Aid Is Restored for Prisoners as Part of the Stimulus Bill (December 23, 2020)
Rules Committee Print, Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021 (Senate Amendment to HR 133) (December 21, 2020)
– Thomas L. Root