Biden Leaves Mixed Legacy On Criminal Justice Issues

Jillian Snider, an adjunct lecturer at John Jay College of Criminal Justice who served 13 years as an officer for the New York Police Department, said Biden largely fell short of delivering on many of the promises he made at the outset of his presidency.

“I am quite underwhelmed with his achievements,” Snider said. “I don’t really think that he has been able to accomplish all that he had committed to.”

For instance, Snider said, Biden didn’t succeed in brokering an elimination of mandatory minimum sentences, something he strongly advocated for, but which never obtained the necessary backing in Congress.

Snider, who testified before Congress on criminal justice issues, acknowledged that Biden’s quest for reform occurred in a highly polarized environment and uncooperative lawmakers in Washington share some of the blame. Still, even within the realm of the executive power of the presidency, Biden missed important targets, she said.

For example, Biden failed to follow through on his stated support for reconsidering criminal penalties connected to cannabis offenses or for removing marijuana and its derivatives from the list of federally controlled substances. And, Snider noted, Biden’s executive actions pardoning cannabis offenders only affected people in federal custody.

“We have way more people in [state] jails and prisons in America for cannabis than we do at the federal level,” she said.

Moreover, Biden failed to meaningfully improve the relations between police and the public, or make policing more equitable and fair, Snider said, adding that the former president’s executive orders on use of force and the deescalation bill barely made a dent.

“I believe that the president of the United States does not yield enough power to be able to completely transform policing, of course, but I do think that there wasn’t an overt effort taken on his office or himself to try and better police community relationships” she said…

Snider said Trump, Biden’s predecessor who is back in the White House, had a more constructive relationship with chiefs of police and police commissioners during his first time, which trickled down to the rank-and-file officers, boosting morale. Before Trump, President Barack Obama was more vocal than Biden, in both positive and critical ways, about law enforcement.

“Right now, we’re at a pretty considerable low in terms of morale. Agencies are basically scrounging around to make sure that they could fill seats and have enough officers to patrol their jurisdiction. And I think that the Biden administration really didn’t take much notice of that,” said Snider, who worked as a patrol officer and later in undercover operations, street-level narcotics, and field intelligence positions.

Snider said Trump achieved more in reforming criminal justice by signing the First Step Act, which reduced mandatory minimum sentences for certain drug offenses and expanded rehabilitation options in federal prisons, a law that was hailed by reform advocates across the political spectrum as a major milestone.

She also questioned the timing of Biden’s latest pardons and commutations, which came in the waning hours of his mandate and after he issued a full and unconditional pardon to his son for gun and tax evasion felonies, adding that the former president was moved more by an interest in how he could be perceived by critics than by his own clemency.

“What took so long?” Snider said. “That’s a big win for people who have been sitting in prison hoping for a pardon or hoping for their sentence to be commuted, but it took a really long time, and again, what was the motivation behind that?”