President Barack Obama is hoping there’s no Willie Horton among the 6,000 inmates being released early from federal prison.

Reducing the prison population is a key part of Obama’s push for criminal justice reform in his last year as president. He sees it as a way to repair broken communities and spare taxpayers the cost of housing low-level criminals. A bipartisan coalition in Congress is on board, too.


But the mass release set to be completed Monday will test the resolve of this new consensus heading into an election year. The infamous Willie Horton ad is on the minds of activists on both sides: They haven’t forgotten how the grainy, black-and-white mug shot of a bearded black man helped sink Michael Dukakis’ 1988 presidential campaign. As Massachusetts governor, “he allowed first-degree murderers to have weekend passes from prison,” said a voice-over, before describing how Horton kidnapped a couple and raped the woman while out on furlough.

The people released from Friday through Monday are not first-degree murderers — they’re low-level drug offenders, and almost a third are immigrants just headed for a different, predeportation detention — but opponents of sentencing reform are already looking for the next Horton.

“We’re fooling the public when we tell them we’re releasing nonviolent drug offenders,” said Steven Cook, head of the National Association of Assistant U.S. Attorneys, who says downward trends in crime are thanks to the current system of tough sentences.

Advocates are on guard but hope the program's momentum is irreversible.

“Do I expect kind of nefarious attack ads to come out? Of course,” said Michele Jawando, a vice president at the Center for American Progress. “We’re at a turning point historically. Are we going to do something to fix the problem, or are we going to let fear guide us forward?”

By Washington standards, letting people out of prison is relatively easy. This batch is the result of a U.S. Sentencing Commission vote last year that could spring as many as 46,000 inmates in the coming years.

The problem is, no one, including Obama, believes they’re ready to re-enter society. Nationwide, about two-thirds of former inmates will be arrested again within three years of release. It’s hard to get a job as an ex-con, and many states restrict public assistance for felons, so it’s easy for them to fall back into crime.

Obama directed his administration to delay asking about job applicants' criminal histories on Monday, and he's calling on Congress to “ban the box,” as advocates call it, for federal hiring and federal contractors. Getting rid of the checkbox on so many job applications asking whether the applicant has a criminal record would give ex-cons a greater chance to make their case before being automatically ruled out, advocates contend. The administration also announced new grants for re-entry education and legal aid to get criminal records cleared.

Obama traveled to Newark on Monday to highlight the work of Integrity House, a drug rehab organization that helps the formerly incarcerated get housing, job training and employment. The president met with Daryl Rose, a former inmate and Integrity House resident — following up on meetings with ex-cons in Philadelphia and those currently at a federal prison in Oklahoma. It’s part of his personal bid to remove the stigma of incarceration.

The administration also highlighted Newark's pilot re-entry court, a partnership with the federal government, where ex-inmates at a high risk of re-offending meet regularly with a team that helps them find jobs and other services, like therapy, that will help them re-integrate.

Re-entry reform isn’t part of a comprehensive measure currently before the Senate. Advocates of systemic overhaul say it’s a glaring omission.

“The scariest thing is the status quo because thousands of inmates are released every year from halfway houses and from prisons, and so currently we find ourselves without adequate re-entry programs,” said Holly Harris, head of the U.S. Justice Action Network, which is lobbying Congress to pass the reforms on behalf of a left-right coalition that includes Koch Industries and the NAACP.

What the Senate bill does have is retroactive sentencing cuts for some nonviolent drug offenders. That goes too far for Republican presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz, who backs sentencing reform in principle.

“None of us know what those 7,082 prisoners did,” he said, suggesting that they might have originally been charged with a violent crime, but made a plea bargain for a lesser offense.

“When police officers across this country are under assault right now, are being vilified, when we’re seeing violent crime spiking in our cities across the country, I think it would be a serious mistake for the Senate to pass legislation providing for 7,082 convicted criminals potentially to be released early,” Cruz said.

Cruz’s analysis of how many inmates would be released early is a few thousand higher than some others. Under normal circumstances, about 55,000 people leave the federal prison system annually.

But while the early release proportions are small — and a recent study shows they re-offend at the same rate as those who served their full terms, about 45 percent — it takes only one example to generate a 30-second campaign ad. Cook said they’ve already found a case in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where a former federal inmate would have been in jail on the day he killed a man in 2011, if not for a sped-up release.

“When criminals are in custody, they’re not victimizing the good and honest citizens in our community,” Cook said. “When they’re out on the street, they are.”

Those types of arguments are “so old school,” said Harris. “It just sounds old and dated and just so out of tune with where we are in the society.”

But privately, advocates worry a high-profile bad apple could spoil the whole bunch of systemic changes. That’s why they haven’t been clamoring for Obama to speed up another major prison release project: his clemency initiative. Volunteer defense lawyers gripe that of the tens of thousands of applications they've processed, Obama has granted only 89 commutations; still, activists are more comfortable with the administration’s nit-picking.

The move away from tough-on-crime laws like mandatory minimum sentences is driven by concerns about bloated prison budgets and disproportionate, racially biased punishments for relatively minor drug crimes. Those laws gained favor during the crime waves of the 1980s and 90s — since then, crime rates have gone way down, although some cities have experienced spikes in the past year.

That’s been a problem in California, where a ballot initiative to reduce prison overcrowding converted some felony convictions to misdemeanors. As a result, thousands of people — many of them drug addicts — have been released early, and it’s harder to put them back in jail when they re-offend.

San Francisco’s police chief blamed the changes for an uptick in property crime. And Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck noted at a White House forum last month that lack of adequate re-entry programs is a key problem.

“It does no good in my estimation to arrest for these offenses over and over and over again with no place for them to go but back onto the street to continue that cycle,” said Beck, who is a member of Law Enforcement Leaders to Reduce Crime and Incarceration, which supports sentencing and prison reform.

However, other states have led the way with other changes to sentencing rules that don’t involve retroactive sentencing cuts, with more positive results. Texas was an early model, funding drug treatment and diversion programs and giving prosecutors more flexibility to keep addicts out of jail. Cruz lauded the results in February, when he announced his support for cutting federal mandatory minimums – before he deemed the retroactive cuts a deal-breaker.

“From 2005, the state of Texas has seen a 22 percent decrease in crime and a 12 percent decrease in expenditures on criminal justice,” Cruz said. “These are basic common sense. It’s also a matter of justice.”

As the ex-cons rejoin society, opponents are keeping an eye on the crime stats: “We’d all be pretty naïve to think that the sentencing reform that they’ve gone through doesn’t have a direct correlation” to recent crime spikes, Cook said.

Others are urging patience -- and compassion.

“Everybody should be prepared that this isn’t going to be perfect. There are going to be people who are going to make mistakes,” Harris said. “We can’t look at it anecdotally. We have to look at it from a data perspective.”

