Quote Originally Posted by Montmorency View Post
The federal prison bill wasn't actually that significant, affecting as it did a small subset of the federal prison population, which is itself a tenth of the overall prison population. It is an improvement, at least for sentencing going forward. Hey, I'm not going to resist making life easier for 5 or 10 thousand people here or there. But it's no 'great compromise', it is (or should be seen as) boilerplate.
Your expectations are too high. If this bill got out in front of the public early, it would have been pounced upon as being soft on crime, same as with any bill that treats prisoners as anything more than cheap labor.
That fact that most Republicans agreed to come to the table at all on this topic, whether it was for 5 prisoners or 5 million, took some amount of political courage.