President Trump signed the First Step Act last December. The bill marks the beginning of criminal justice reform, aiming to reduce recidivism, improve living conditions for inmates, and decrease sentences in the United States. However, these changes are only — as the name suggests — the first steps.

To unravel the twisted mess of the rate of recidivism and high numbers of incarceration within the criminal justice system, education programs and sentencing reform will be needed. With the presidential campaign race starting, issues within the criminal justice system will be prevalent in candidates’ platforms.

Stemming from pre-existing laws, the First Step Act will fix the minimum sentences that target minorities and will release rehabilitated inmates.

The sentencing laws before the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 allowed judges to give African-American offenders longer prison sentences for selling crack cocaine, while white offenders received less for selling powder cocaine. According to the Marshall Project, nearly 2,600 federal inmates will be able to petition for a re-evaluation of their cases under the First Step Act.

The new law’s changes also improve inmate living conditions. The bill requires that inmates must be placed within 500 driving miles of their families, prevents juveniles from being held in solitary confinement in almost all cases and bans the shackling of pregnant women up to three months after childbirth.

Requiring closer incarceration to inmates’ families makes visits easier. To put it in perspective, St. Louis, MO is about 500 miles away from St. Paul, meaning before the First Step Act, some families would have had to drive more than eight hours to visit their family member.

According to the Charles Koch Institute, “Prison visitation has been found to reduce recidivism, decrease prison violence, and prevent the intergenerational cycle of incarceration.”

Having a support system allows inmates to more easily re-integrate into society and sets them up to be successful upon release.

The First Step Act also requires the Federal Bureau of Prisons to supply sanitary napkins and tampons for female inmates. Michael Deegan-Mccree, a policy associate for criminal justice reform group Cut 50, told Time that he worked with women who, while in federal prison, were allowed 12 tampons and sanitary napkins per week. If they needed extra, they had to prove to male correctional officers that they had used up their allotted amount.

One of the key components of the law is a new system that tailors prison to the needs of the inmates. By practicing good behavior and participating in education and training programs, inmates―with the exception of several categories of high-risk criminals―receive “good time credits.”

Before the law, inmates without a disciplinary record could decrease their sentence by 47 days per year incarcerated. Now, the number has increased to 54. The system, currently being created by the Bureau of Prisons, will use scientific models to determine each inmate’s risk of re-offending and place them into categories based on their needs.

These changes are modeled after previous initiatives that have seen success at the state level. Louisiana, a state that had the highest incarceration rate, recently established new laws similar to the First Step Act, reducing the mandatory minimum sentence for specific offenses and allowing nonviolent offenders to earn “good time credit” easier.

According to Jon Shuppe for NBC News, “In June, researchers announced that Louisiana’s incarceration rate had dropped from its No. 1 ranking. [In July], officials said the state had saved $12 million, twice the amount they’d expected, a portion of which would be used to fund re-entry programs.”

Although accurate statistics on the rate of recidivism won’t be available for a couple years, programs aimed to help inmates re-acclimate themselves with society are effective.

The Charles Koch Institute reports that research done on educational and vocational classes already in place found that they “reduce recidivism by 13 percent, reduce incident reports for prisoner misconduct by 4 percent, and increase post-release employment by 13 percent.”

Even though the First Step Act includes important changes, the effect of this bill will be relatively small. The law only applies to federal prisons, meaning out of the 2.1 million people incarcerated Americans, only 183,000 reap the benefits the First Step Act provides. This number equates to roughly 8 percent of the total number of people in the prison system.

The U.S. has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. If our jail and prison population was a country, it would be about the size of Slovenia. If it was a city, it would out-populate Austin, Texas and San Francisco, California combined by 300,000 people. The First Step Act should inspire individual states to follow suit with their own reforms, which would affect a larger number of the incarcerated population―roughly 1.8 million.

There is still a long journey ahead to fix the problems within the criminal justice system. One of the key issues is ensuring that inmates have access to programs that will help them gain skills, job training, and mental health and substance abuse support.

The Charles Koch Institute states that “the current strategies used by our justice system to achieve rehabilitation and increased public safety have been ineffective, with more than 80 percent of those leaving our state prisons being re-arrested again in the future.”

Programs, such as the nonprofits The Last Mile, Miles of Freedom, and Hudson Link, aim to combat these challenges and equip the incarcerated with the skills they need to become productive members of society and avoid further criminal behavior upon release. The mentioned nonprofits focus on education and job readiness, and Hudson Link reports a recidivism rate of less than two percent among its graduates.

Another major issue surrounds the hundreds of thousands of Americans waiting behind bars for their case to come to trial because they cannot afford bail. Some innocent people have spent years in jail because they couldn’t pay bail.

In July 2018, Sen. Bernie Sanders introduced a bill that would end the money-bail system. Under the No Money Bail Act of 2018, grants would fund states to implement alternative pretrial systems. The act would eventually save money, considering that―according to Sanders’ website―detaining someone costs $75 per day, while supervising them in the community costs only $7.

Sanders isn’t the only 2020 hopeful presidential candidate taking a stand for change within the system. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris also include criminal justice reform in their campaign platforms.

Overall, the First Step Act is a good start to improve living conditions and ease of readjusting to society for inmates, but there is more work to be done to heal the wounds caused by the system and ensure that the same mistakes are not repeated.

Kayla Mayer can be contacted at maye8518@stthomas.edu.