At a prison-reform summit held at the White House last Friday, Donald Trump declared that “America is a nation that believes in the power of redemption.” For the last several weeks, his Administration has pushed Congress to support a bipartisan bill known as the First Step Act, which aims to better prepare inmates to reënter society by incentivizing participation in drug-treatment and job-training programs. The law would allow nonviolent offenders who earn “good-time credits” to serve the final days of their sentences in halfway houses or home confinement. Last month, Jared Kushner announced the Administration’s support for the bill in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, writing that the six million Americans in local and federal prisons are included among “the forgotten men and women” that Trump vowed to fight for during his Presidential campaign. “Get a bill to my desk, and I will sign it,” Trump promised. The House passed the bill this week.

The Administration’s push for reform, though, is deeply dividing Washington on a rare issue of bipartisan agreement in the Trump era. The approach backed by Trump and Kushner in the First Step Act is limited in scope and focussed on giving current inmates a “second chance” by promoting reëntry programs—so-called “back end” reforms. In an unusual political alliance, the congressmen Hakeem Jeffries, a Democrat from Brooklyn, and Doug Collins, a Republican from Georgia, are co-sponsoring the bill.

A second, more ambitious reform proposal, the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act, aims to ease prison overpopulation through sentencing reform. These “front end” reforms would reduce mandatory-minimum sentences, restore judges’ discretion regarding sentencing, and end the three-strikes rule.

Like the First Step Act, the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act has bipartisan political support. It is co-sponsored by Senators Chuck Grassley, a conservative Republican from Iowa, and Dick Durbin, a liberal Democrat from Illinois. In 2016, the bill was killed by then Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who blocked the measure from reaching the floor during an election year. Sessions, who is now Trump’s Attorney General, remains one of the bill’s most formidable detractors.

In February, the White House issued a blow to Grassley when it said that it did not see a path forward for legislation to reduce mandatory-minimum prison sentences. In his Journal op-ed, Kushner wrote that the continued debate on whether legislation should prioritize front-end or back-end reforms “should not impede the immediate progress the federal government can make to give former prisoners a better shot at a successful life.” In other words, something is better than nothing.

Despite the current division in Washington, the political appetite for prison reform has come a long way in a relatively short time. The emergence of now discredited terms such as “super-predators” and “wilding” in the nineteen-nineties fuelled popular fear and a moral panic that led President Bill Clinton to sign the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, in 1994. A January poll from the Justice Action Network, a criminal-justice-reform group, showed that eighty-seven per cent of registered voters support reforms to mandatory minimums; seventy-six per cent strongly support reforming the criminal-justice system; and seventy-three per cent that think Americans spend too much money on prisons instead of treatment, rehabilitation, and victims’ services.

Yet, while sweeping prison reforms have been enacted in several states, similar measures on the national level have languished for decades. Since 1980, the federal prison population has swelled by almost six-hundred per cent. If the United States’ total population had ballooned at the same rate, there would be 1.6 trillion Americans cramming the country. Federal prison spending, when adjusted for inflation, has climbed by six hundred per cent. Under the Obama Administration, the incarcerated population in federal prisons decreased, and the Justice Department began phasing out the use of private, for-profit prisons, which critics accused of profiteering. During the 2016 campaign, Trump, Sessions and the Freedom Caucus brought back tough-on-crime, “law and order” rhetoric. Trump has called for the death penalty for drug dealers, and the 2019 federal prison budget anticipates a three per cent increase in the prison population through the 2019 fiscal year.

Kushner’s involvement in the issue has given the Administration’s embrace of prison reform an air of compassion. For him, the subject is personal. In 2005, his father, Charles Kushner, was convicted of illegal campaign contributions and witness tampering, and spent fourteen months in a federal prison. The billionaire was released to a halfway house for the rest of his two-year sentence. Kushner has been hosting bipartisan prison reform meetings with governors, congressional representatives, religious leaders, and policy experts.

Supporters of reform blame Sessions for thwarting both “front end” and “back end” reform efforts. The Department of Justice reduced funding for halfway houses and closed reëntry centers, restored the use of private prisons, and embraced the idea of incarceration as a business opportunity for private-sector companies. Last week, the Democratic lawmakers John Lewis, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Dick Durbin, and Sheila Jackson Lee said that they opposed the First Step Act because it would boost the use of halfway houses and rehabilitation programs run by for-profit companies. “We are also deeply concerned that this bill could facilitate the privatization of federal prison programming at a time when the Trump Administration is working closely with the private prison industry,” the letter read.

The Democrats also argued that the bill does not address poverty, prison overpopulation, and the disproportionate number of black and Latino inmates behind bars. Prisoners convicted of immigration and drug offenses account for over fifty-three per cent of the federal prison population, but some immigration and drug offenders are not eligible to earn the “good-time credits” that would allow them to leave prison early under the Trump-backed measure. They say that the First Step Act will do little to address the problems of overcrowding and discriminatory policing, and called for the passage of the sweeping Senate bill that would enable sentencing reform.

Doug Collins, the Republican backer of the more limited reform bill, argued that incremental change was the only realistic option. “For a very long time, people have argued that criminal-justice reform has to happen through a single bill, but history screams that that’s not true,” Collins told me. “A bill like the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act includes many good provisions, but there’s no consensus around it and it’s not in a position to win support in both houses of Congress, let alone in the White House.”

Inimai M. Chettiar, the director of the Justice Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, told me that Trump and McConnell are deliberately thwarting broader prison-reform efforts. “The Trump Administration is intentionally dividing Congress on this issue by pushing its own bill instead of throwing its support behind Senator Grassley’s efforts,” she said. “Congress and the White House assume the public will be satisfied with marginal tweaks to our criminal-justice system. But with one in three black men behind bars, a growing female prisoner population, and a growing rural prisoner population, more and more people are affected by mass incarceration.” Chettiar, who attended two White House gatherings on the issue hosted by Kushner, said that she believes that Kushner sincerely supports reform, but that he “is being held hostage by the far right of the Republican Party.” The President, she said, is squandering a rare opportunity for bold, bipartisan reform.