By Steve Brawner, © 2018 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

In politics, it’s often not about who’s right and who’s wrong. Instead, it’s often about who’s more right. Which brings us to Sen. Tom Cotton and the FIRST STEP Act.

President Trump signed the criminal justice reform act into law Dec. 21, a day after the House passed it 358-36. Previously, the Senate had passed it 87-12. Cotton was the most vocal opponent among the 12 (and the 36). The rest of Arkansas’ congressional delegation voted yes.

Politics makes strange bedfellows. Advocates across the political spectrum supported the law, including Charles and David Koch, the ultra-wealthy, conservative activists, and the American Civil Liberties Union. President Trump supported it, but according to insider news reports, it was his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, the son of an ex-federal inmate, who really pushed it.

The law will give judges more freedom when sentencing convicts, change the “three strikes and you’re out” provision from life to 25 years, and let inmates receive “earned time credits” for job training and rehabilitative activities. In other words, if you learn a skill, you can get out of prison sooner. It also would increase the number of “good time credits” prisoners can earn for good behavior from 47 days to 54. Among other provisions, federal prisoners must be housed within 500 miles of their families.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates the law will reduce the number of federal prisoners by 53,000 person-years from 2019-28. That’s about 53,000 inmates per year.

It applies only to the nation’s 181,000 federal inmates. Counting state prisons and local jails, the prison population is 2.1 million. The United States has the world’s highest incarceration rate at 655 prisoners per 100,000 people, according to World Prison Brief, though who knows how accurate North Korea’s and China’s numbers are? By comparison, Canada incarcerates 114 per 100,000, or one-sixth as many.

Cotton fought this tooth and nail, arguing it will let bad people out of jail. He’s been consistent with this argument. In 2016 when another criminal justice reform bill failed, he suggested the United States has an “under-incarceration problem.”

Supporters say the law has adequate safeguards. But no doubt eventually some newly freed offenders will commit crimes when they would have been in jail had the FIRST STEP Act not passed. A 2016 Bureau of Justice Statistics study found that 43 percent of federal offenders placed in community supervision in 2005 were arrested at least once within five years. But you can’t keep most people in jail forever, and you wouldn’t want to.

Would more prison time solve the problem, or make it worse? Are convicts just bad people? Or does caging humans for years with other convicts and then freeing them into a world stacked against them increase the chances they’ll reoffend? Texas, hardly a liberal state, closed eight prisons, reduced its prison population by 30,000, and saw its crime rate drop to the lowest rate in five decades. The recidivism rate has fallen, too. Texas’ experiences were an inspiration for the FIRST STEP Act.

So the question to be answered is not who is right, but who is more right.

Crime would fall tomorrow, perhaps only temporarily, if every person who has committed a crime were locked up. Of course, that would create many other problems, both short-term and long-term. On the other hand, if the Texas model can be replicated, both the prison population and crime can fall at the same time.

At least most of us can agree about the goals. We want a system that enhances public safety, deters crime, rehabilitates offenders, and provides justice to crime victims.

We don’t agree about exactly how to get there. Clearly, criminal justice reform is needed. The FIRST STEP Act was a first step. If it works, let’s take another. If not, and Cotton is more right, we should step back, or step in another direction.