Jared Kushner

They just had a report that showed that the general population

It's at a 47% recidivism rate, meaning that people who leave federal prison, half of them go back.

And people who have now taken this program, only 12% of them go back.

So number one, you're making communities safer because if people are going to now get a job and enter society, instead of committing future crimes, you're avoiding future crimes.

And number two, you're giving people a second chance at life.

And so that was the first part of it.

The second thing we did was there was a rule passed in the 90s that basically penalized crack cocaine at 100 times the penalty of what regular cocaine was.

And I think a lot of the motivations what people say in retrospect was that crack was more of a black drug and cocaine was more of a white drug.

And so there was a really racial disparity in terms of what the application of these sentences were.

So they then revised that to make it 18 to one.

And what we did in this bill is we allowed it to go retroactive to allow people who were in prison with sentences under the, what we thought was the racist law to be able to make an application to a judge in order to be dismissed.

And it was based on good behavior, um,

being rehabilitated and the fact that they would have a low probability of offending in the future.

And so that was really the meat of it.

And there was a couple other things in there we did as well, which were also quite good.

So we did it, worked very closely with the Democrats, Republicans to do it.

At first, President Trump was a little bit skeptical of it because he's a big, strong law and order supporter, but he made me work very hard to put together a coalition of Republicans and Democrats and law enforcement.

We had the support from

from the policemen.

We had the support from the ACLU.