The willingness to listen, change her thinking, and incorporate ideas from other politicians’ plans—publicly highlighting that she’s doing so—is one of the things that most distinguishes Sen. Elizabeth Warren from her Democratic presidential primary rivals and, frankly, from much of Congress. She’s done that again with a big update to her comprehensive criminal justice reform plan.
Warren cites Sen. Cory Booker, who dropped out of the primary in January, for a new facet of the plan, which was originally released last summer. “And thank you to @BlackWomxnFor for challenging me to join him,” she wrote on Twitter. “I ask you to continue holding me accountable.”
The Booker-inspired addition to Warren’s plan would add a new focus to the clemency board she proposed in August, to overcome the way “today’s hierarchical process at DOJ results in relatively few and conservative clemency recommendations.”
”Today I'm announcing that, in a Warren administration, we will create a clemency board that will prioritize cases of older Americans incarcerated for unduly long sentences and establish a presumption of release, unless the board finds a danger to public safety,” she wrote.
”Data show that people tend to age out of crime and are less likely to recidivate, but thousands of elderly people remain behind bars. Those serving sentences equivalent to life are disproportionately Black and Brown, many for nonviolent crimes or crimes committed as juveniles,” Warren continued. “At the same time, overcrowded prisons too often fail to meet basic human rights standards. Under existing conditions, these sentences are inhumane. A president can use her clemency powers to right systemic injustice—and I plan to do just that.”
This is an important policy move, shining a light on one of the many ways mass incarceration causes damage across the population. But it’s equally an important model for how high-level politicians should conduct themselves, being open to incorporating other people’s good ideas in their own policy plans and listening when they’re told how they’re getting things wrong. It’s hard to think of a political leader who does that at the level Elizabeth Warren does.