Gang member released under First Step Act wanted for murder

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t’s exactly why proponents of the bipartisan leniency for violent drug traffickers and gang members didn’t want a transparent debate in Congress over the bill. It’s why they stifled all dissent and rammed the biggest change to federal prison sentencing in three decades through the House on a “suspension vote” with no debate or hearings during the last moments in session last year, when all eyes were focused on the pending government shutdown. They didn’t want you to know they’d be releasing people like Joel Francisco of Providence, Rhode Island.

In order to perpetuate the lie that we are somehow unjustly incarcerating too many people for too long and that there is a general over-incarceration problem, particularly in federal prison, phony conservatives joined liberals in selling the First Step Act as nothing more than “prison reform,” never telling the fact that it dramatically cut sentencing for thousands of hardened criminals. They told us it would only affect first time, low-level, non-violent offenders. In reality, federal prosecutors only pursue the worst criminals in a given area, who are often gang leaders fueling widespread violence, and convict them on drug charges. That is why CR is the only legislation scorecard that had the fortitude to score against this travesty of a bill.

In February, when the first wave of prisoners were released, Joel Francisco was among them. Who is Joel Francisco? According to Cmdr. Thomas Verdi, deputy chief of the Providence Police Department, quoted in the Providence Journal, he is a “cold, evil, violent person.”

“Some criminals deserve to spend their lives incarcerated,” Verdi said. “Joel is one.”

Yet like most people in federal prison for drug charges, he was officially “only” convicted as a crack dealer. He was sentenced to life in prison in 2005 because it was his third conviction. That sounds harsh, but he was hit with the maximum sentence because he was a Latin Kings gang leader who was believed to be responsible for a lot of violence in the city. The incarceration of people like him is the single most important factor in driving down the murder rate since the 1990s.

In 2010, Congress passed the Fair Sentencing Act, which raised the quantity of crack cocaine needed to trigger the sentencing guidelines to be more on par with the levels of powder cocaine. Among the many retroactive jailbreak provisions of the First Step Act of 2018 was section 404, which applied the leniencies of the 2010 act to crack dealers already convicted prior to enactment. Francisco was one who was released under the retroactive reduction of sentencing for repeat crack dealers. 2,600 federal inmates are potentially eligible for retroactive reductions under this provision, according to the Marshall Project.

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