The NPR Politics Podcast - No One Has Been Granted Clemency During Biden Administration

Episode Date: December 9, 2021

Joe Biden pledged ambitious criminal justice reforms as a candidate, but has taken few steps during his time in office to deliver them. And the FBI says diversifying its special agent ranks is a top priority, but its history of abuses during the civil rights era is a major recruitment hurdle.This episode: White House correspondent Asma Khalid, national justice correspondent Carrie Johnson, and justice correspondent Ryan Lucas.Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Frances with my four-year-old rescue dog named Goose. Goose and I are currently hiking the historic Bayfield Road Trail in Maple, Wisconsin. This episode was recorded at 2.02 p.m. Eastern Time on Thursday, December 9th. By the time you hear this, things may have changed, but hopefully Goose and I will still be soaking up what is an absolutely gorgeous fall season here in the Lake Superior region. Okay, here's the show. Oh, Ryan, it's like it was made for you and me, a Wisconsin dog time stamp. Rescue dogs, Wisconsin. Oh, that's way up north. Super cold up there. Beautiful, though. Beautiful. Well, hey there. It's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Asma Khalid. I cover the White House.

I'm Ryan Lucas. I cover the Justice Department. And I'm Keri Johnson, National Justice Correspondent. And today on the show, we look at the stalled efforts to overhaul the criminal justice system. People working for these changes have been frustrated with the Biden administration's progress or, frankly, lack of progress. And And Carrie, you have got some reporting on this. You've been interviewing people about this very issue. So talk to us about what you have been hearing. Yeah, first of all, if you heard a little bit of a noise, that was my rescue dog, Frankie. So I apologize. She heard me say the word DOG and things went south. Okay. So with respect to the

Biden administration and overhauling the criminal justice system, I got to tell you, advocates who have been pushing the administration are getting frustrated. They're telling me that the time for lip service is over and the time for action is now. They've had good meetings in the past with the White House and the Justice Department, But the gap between what now President Biden and Vice President Harris promised on the campaign trail and what's actually happened so far is a pretty big gap, they think. Carrie, do you think that that is a reflection of how big the promises were or is it truly just a lack of progress? Well, I think a lot of the things that they talked about on the campaign trail, rethinking capital punishment, ending the federal death penalty, getting rid of mandatory minimum prison sentences for a lot of drug-related crimes, some of those things are things that take the will of Congress and the White House and the Justice Department, and they just take a while. But other things are items the president could do with the stroke of a pen, and they just take a while. But other things are items the president could do

with the stroke of a pen, and it just hasn't happened yet. And Carrie, I mean, what is something that he could do on his own? Is that clemency, right? Something he could do unilaterally? Yeah, you got that right, Asma. No clemencies, none, except for those turkeys who were pardoned in November. And that is actually more than a joke. I mean, people in the criminal justice reform community were kind of annoyed with that because when President Obama left office, remember, he had a big clemency push. There were 2,500 people in prison at that time who met all of the Obama criteria, who were not acted on, who did not win clemency in the Obama years. And then there's a new population of people that advocates are pushing for. These are people who were actually let out of prison into home confinement during the Trump administration because of the pandemic. And the Biden administration has not given assurance yet that those people will not be sent back to prison when the pandemic is over. I talked with a guy named Kevin Ring about this. He works for an advocacy group

called FAM, the group formerly known as Families Against Mandatory Minimums. For somebody who isn't sure whether they can get a lease, start a family, start a relationship, begin college courses, get on with their life. It's incredibly callous to say, oh, we haven't made a decision yet and we don't have to because this pandemic is still going on. So Kevin Ring basically says that these people have, you know, an inability to make major life decisions because they don't know if they're going to have to go back in 2022 or 2023 or whenever this pandemic ends. And the president, in his view, should just make a decision and be clear about what's going to happen to those folks. You know, Carrie, I cover the White House, and I will say I don't see this as really being an

issue at the forefront, at least not from what I've heard publicly from them. And I'm curious how you and what you have heard from the administration in response to some of this criticism. Yeah, sure. I talked with Michael Gwynn, who's a spokesman for the White House. He said the administration has been doing a lot since its first day in office. He talked about the DOJ banning chokeholds and no-knock warrants for federal law enforcement. He talked about the Biden executive order to end or phase out contracts with private prisons. And he talked about making it easier for people leaving prison and returning home to access services. He says that they're still going to work on executive actions and work with Congress. Carrie, there have been a number of

civil rights investigations launched by the Justice Department under Biden's tenure. And are activists, you know, pleased by that move in particular? Yeah, they want to give credit where credit is due. So they're happy that the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department has taken action in a way that the Trump Justice Department was mostly loath to do. The Biden DOJ has announced a big pattern or practice civil rights investigations of the police force in Minneapolis and Louisville, Mount Vernon, New York and Phoenix. And I think there's going to be more to come there. But the list of demands, the list of asks from the criminal justice and civil rights community is a long list. And there's just a lot of concern now that if they haven't done easy things, relatively easy things like clemency, there's not a political will to do even harder things

down the line. Kerry, one question that I have is whether do presidents often in their first year grant clemency to a large number of people? Well, you know, I want to be fair here. Often those clemencies, for all kinds of reasons, tend to happen around major holidays. So we've just been through Thanksgiving with none. But it's possible that, you know, in the waning weeks of this year, we might see something out of the Biden White House. That said, you know, there are a few

thousand people, as I mentioned, who are waiting for a decision, waiting for some kind of relief. Dating back to the Obama administration, there are another few thousand people who were released on home confinement. And then altogether, altogether, the DOJ Office of Pardon Attorney has a backlog of 18,000 clemency petitions. So time's a-wasting. 18,000, that's a lot of people, a lot of lives. And Carrie, one of the things that stood out to me from your reporting is in addition to this clemency issue, the federal prison population itself has actually grown since Joe Biden took office. And, you know, that seems counterintuitive to, I think, a lot of the messaging that I heard from Democrats

during the campaign. So explain that to us. What's going on here? Yeah, absolutely. So let's be fair here, right? That we are in a pandemic. At the start of the pandemic, a lot of federal courthouses closed down or seriously limited their operations. Some federal prisons stopped admitting new people. Some of that has restarted this year, right? But all in all, a senior analyst from the Sentencing Project told me that by her calculations, there are now 5,000 more people in federal prison today than when Joe Biden took the oath of office. And that certainly is counter to a lot of the rhetoric we heard on the campaign trail from this president, who, after all, basically said he wanted to, in part, atone for some of the decisions he made in the Senate that led to a lot of people going to prison

for decades on drug crimes and other offenses. All right, well, let's take a quick break. And when we get back, we'll talk about the FBI's effort to diversify its ranks. And we're back. And Ryan, you have been doing some really good reporting on the FBI and how the agency is trying to recruit more Black people to the force. Historically, the FBI has not been a particularly diverse workplace, especially when you look at special agent data. So before we get into what the FBI says that it is doing to change that, what does the FBI agent core look like right now? 80% of special agents are white. Overwhelmingly, that is white male. Less than 5% of the FBI

special agents are black. This is particularly important with special agents because it really is the trademark job of the FBI. When people think of the FBI, that is who they're thinking of. And so it is something that the FBI is trying, has tried in years past, but is now making what the Bureau says is a more concerted effort to try to improve this. You know, in some ways, this is not a new challenge, right? I remember that in the 1990s, in the early 1990s, a group of Black employees sued the FBI over discrimination. Many of these were special agents. I think there's an ongoing lawsuit now by women who say they were discriminated against at the FBI Training Academy and elsewhere within the

Bureau. These are kind of longstanding challenges. What about this new effort, you know, distinguish itself? Why does the FBI director think now is a different time? Well, I don't know if it's so much that the FBI director thinks that it's a different time as kind of events may have, in a sense, forced his hand. Obviously, the turmoil around George Floyd's killing and the unrest that we saw following that made the relationship that the FBI and law enforcement writ large has with the African-American community a front page deal. Ray has said publicly that this is a priority for him. I think, Kerry, you may recall former director James Comey saying the same thing when he was director, and they didn't really move the needle a whole lot. Ray has taken steps to try to improve this in the sense that he's appointed a chief diversity officer, a longtime agent by the

name of Scott McMillian. I sat down with him at FBI headquarters and asked him about this new initiative, which the FBI has launched to try to hire more young African Americans in particular. It's called the Beacon Project. And he acknowledged when I was talking to him that it hasn't been easy for the FBI historically to have diversity in its ranks. And he said a lot of that is on the FBI. Historically, we have not been the best, particularly for the African-American community, where you're talking about surveillance operations, where you're talking about the civil rights failures that the FBI has had.

You know, and some of that is a reference to the FBI surveillance of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, which is something that looms over the FBI's relationship with African-Americans in this country. Looms over so much that the former director, Jim Comey, kept on his desk some materials related to the FBI surveillance of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It's very chilling and kind of horrifying stuff to this day. I mean, to that point then, Ryan, I mean, there are plenty of reasons, plenty of rightful reasons why folks of color might mistrust the FBI. And I know we're talking largely about the African American community here. But, you know, as a Muslim, I will say, like, I mean, candidly, in Muslim communities to join the FBI, like reputationalized,

people would assume you're a snitch, like it doesn't have a great reputation. Right. And that's something that, you know, I spoke to a couple of Black retired agents who talked about this. And these were two people who both said that they loved their careers at the FBI. One of them spent more than 20 years, the other spent more than three decades. And they said, you know, it's far more difficult for the FBI to recruit African-Americans because of that history. You know, Ryan, so what is the FBI explicitly doing now that they think would be different perhaps than what they've done in the past? The difference with this beacon project that they launched this past summer in Alabama. It was a meeting between Director Wray, senior FBI leaders, and the presidents of more than two dozen historically black colleges and universities.

The FBI is reaching out to the heads of these universities to try to get them on the FBI's side in terms of encouraging students at these universities to consider a career with the FBI. That said, there's the question of whether this is any different than in the past, because there's been talk from FBI leadership in the past about trying to diversify its ranks. What one former agent, Rhonda Glover-Reese, told me is so important, and that is leadership has to consistently make clear that diversifying the FBI's ranks and the ranks of special agents in particular is a priority. We want diversity of thought. We want people that have diverse backgrounds. That's what we want. And I'm telling you that this is how I feel as the director of the FBI. I want to hear that.

You know, one thing that really comes to mind when I hear her talk about diversity of thought, and I hear Asma talk about how the Bureau is perceived in the Muslim American community is, you know, we're all still trying pretty hard to figure out how intelligent signs and flashing lights were missed by law enforcement before January 6th. And I've got to say that this conversation makes me think about the composition of the people in the FBI who make these calls and judgments. And it calls into question in my mind whether a lot of the people who stormed the Capitol on January 6th, whether they look different, whether the Bureau might have perceived them to be more of a threat and taken different kinds of action leading up to that day. This is a big accountability question. It's not just what the ranks of the workforce look like. It's how you view the world and how you view national security, too. Carrie, I think that's a really valid and important point for us to keep in mind.

All right. Well, let us leave it there for today. I'm Asma Khalid. I cover the White House. I'm Ryan Lucas. I cover the Justice Department. And I'm Carrie Johnson, national justice correspondent. And thank you all, as always, for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.