Also to mention... to challenge preconceptions about who's behind this stuff, the current US president (who many would consider "liberal" or "leftist") made great efforts and progress toward locking up lots of people ("tough on crime"), especially minorities, in the past. The last president (who many would consider more to the right of the political spectrum) actually did a lot to reform and fix that, especially for minorities.
Later, after being elected president, that president (who most would consider pretty politically incoherent on traditional ideological divides, and animated almost entirely on the single issue of defending the American ethnic against "others" without and within, and who spent most of his presidency calling for the broader use of violence against perceived criminals, oversaw a record return to federal capital punishment, expanded the use of paramilitary law enforcement, and directly assumed control of law enforcement using loopholes in the executive branch's authority to do so) signed a bipartisan crime reform bill he had nothing to do with at the urging of a reality tv star who is pretending to become a lawyer and who was briefly married to a mentally ill rapper who for some reason endorsed the president.
If we're looking to ascribe an ideological dimension to crime politics in the US, it would be easy: during the entire modern party system, Republicans have consistently been to the right of Democrats on crime (even in periods where Democrats have been, in a global sense, to the right of the median). The bulk of major crime bills have been nearly unanimous consent, including both the 1994 Crime bill and the First Step Act, but the contents of those bills have compromises where the right seeks "tougher" provisions and the left seeks more conciliatory provisions.
Court politics has been even more obviously partisan. Of the current Supreme Court justices, Thomas and Alito favour obviously expanding the use of capital punishment and view most litigation related to it a liberal plot to undermine the justice system; Breyer and Sotomayor have signalled they believe the constitution more or less mandates abolition. It's a clear as day divide. Most other criminal justice issues have the same dimensions in the courts, and even lower in the circuit courts as well.
Have they talked/written about it being a "liberal plot" or is that just a (quite possibly entirely accurate) description of a belief that would explain their actions without their having come out and said that?
I'd be interested to learn more if you have any suggested reading on the current members of the SC (not an area I know a huge amount about).
> “Those who oppose the death penalty are free to try to persuade legislatures to abolish the death penalty. Some of those efforts have been successful. They’re free to ask this court to overrule the death penalty. But until that occurs, is it appropriate for the judiciary to countenance what amounts to a guerrilla war against the death penalty, which consists of efforts to make it impossible for the states to obtain drugs that could be used to carry out capital punishment with little, if any, pain?” Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito [1]
[1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/alito-death-penalty-guerrilla...
> During his 15-year career on the U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals, Alito participated in 10 capital cases. Five were decided unanimously by three-judge panels and involved fairly straightforward issues. The other five provoked strong differences of opinion between Alito and his colleagues. In every one of the five contested cases, Alito voted against the inmate and issued an opinion. Individually and especially as a whole, these opinions show a troubling tendency to tolerate serious errors in capital proceedings.
> Although O’Connor’s approach to capital punishment has been solidly conservative, she has at times supplied a crucial vote in contentious cases in favor of greater care and fairness in the application of the death penalty. Yet it is precisely in the most contentious cases that Alito has shown an unbroken pattern of excusing errors in capital proceedings and eroding norms of basic fairness. [2]
[2] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-nov-27-oe-liu27...
> In Murphy’s case, Justice Alito, joined by Thomas and Gorsuch, accused defense lawyers of “inexcusably dilatory litigation tactics” and complained that “the great majority” of applications for stays of execution “are almost all filed on or shortly before the scheduled execution date … [with] no good reason for the late filing.” Staying Murphy’s execution, Alito wrote, “countenance[es] the dilatory litigation [and], I fear, will encourage this damaging practice.” While acknowledging that “[t]he claims raised by Murphy and Ray are important and may ultimately be held to have merit,” Alito said that “[p]risoners should bring such claims well before their scheduled executions so that the courts can adjudicate them in the way that the claims require and deserve and so that States are afforded sufficient time to make any necessary modifications to their execution protocols.” [3]
[3] https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/news/death-penalty-opinions-exp...
[4] https://www.ontheissues.org/Court/Samuel_Alito_Crime.htm
[5] https://www.ontheissues.org/Court/Clarence_Thomas_Crime.htm
It's hard to take Trump seriously in the realm of criminal justice reform when considering -- for example -- his reaction to the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd. And that's just one example among many. I won't claim that Biden is a saint here, but painting Trump as a criminal justice reformer is a bit absurd.
Regardless, incarceration isn't really something that changes a lot based on federal-level action, as federal prisoners account for less than 10% of the prison population (the rest are incarcerated at the state level).
https://www.bop.gov/inmates/fsa/overview.jsp
(I'm not taking a position on which president was better or worse on this issue.)
Biden has never been a leftist (not even in the extremely loose sense that the progressive wing of the Democratic Party might be considered “leftist”), he’s always been associated with the centrist/conservative wing of the Party, and that was even more true in the 1990s (when he was involved in the crime legislation you are talking about) then in his post-Senate career (where he has been involved in national campaigns where the centrist faction is weaker within the party than it was in the mid-late 1990s, which were pretty much the peak of its dominance.)
> The last president (who many would consider more to the right of the political spectrum)
I think “corrupt authoritarian opportunist who seized on a perceived opportunity in the more right-leaning party, and particularly with mobilizing its extremist fringes” than describing Trump actually being ideologically to the right in some kind of coherent way that motivates policy over more immediate calculations of personal gain and opportunism.
...and make things worse for the rest of us; but god forbid the state do anything about it with proactive evidence-based early-interventions or treat the perpetrators of crime with compassion and understanding too - otherwise it's called being soft-on-crime or worse: "liberal".