When he stepped into the White House in January 2021, former President Joe Biden brought with him an ambitious criminal justice agenda that aimed to satisfy both reformers and law enforcement advocates, but he never cleared that high bar, with a record of underappreciated successes and missed opportunities.

Biden vowed to reduce the number of people incarcerated in federal prisons while also lowering crime rates, and promised to eliminate mandatory minimum sentences, expand federal funding for alternatives to incarceration, and root out racial and gender inequities in the justice system.

As the curtains closed on his presidency, legal academics and former law enforcement professionals expressed mixed feelings about Biden's performance in improving the criminal justice system. These experts praised Biden's achievements in prison reform, recidivism reduction and his historic clemency actions, while saying he didn't do enough to improve relations between Americans and the police.

Overall, legal experts said Biden fell short on many of his promises, but argued that his administration deserves more credit for successful reforms that flew under the radar.

Joseph Margulies, a professor of law and government at Cornell University, said that one little-noticed achievement of the Biden administration was the massive funding of community-based programs aimed at preventing violence, some of which were shown to be successful in reducing crime.

The U.S. Department of Justice under Biden quietly funneled hundreds of millions of dollars in grants to states, municipalities and nonprofit organizations to fund initiatives addressing the root causes of violence, particularly in urban centers. That approach has helped bring down crime rates in areas such as Baltimore, Detroit and Washington, D.C., he said.

In November, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott said that a violence prevention program adopted by the city called Group Violence Reduction Strategy was crucial in lowering the number of homicides in the city for two years in a row. Scott also noted a drop in nonfatal shootings in that time. The city of Baltimore received a nearly $423,000 grant from the DOJ during fiscal year 2023 to expand the program citywide.

"That work has been really important, and it signals a willingness on the part of the Justice Department to view violence as something other than merely a criminal act," Margulies said. "That's a very important legacy, and the Biden Justice Department deserves to be recognized for that."

The grants were disbursed through two offices under the DOJ's purview, the Bureau of Justice Assistance and the Office of Justice Programs, to entities across the country, both in red and blue states.

According to the BJA's website, for instance, the New York City Board of Education received $1 million in grants to fund a violence prevention program that included a wide range of activities — peer mediation, counseling services, yoga sessions — aimed at improving quality of life and safety at a host of Brooklyn schools where there were documented instances of bullying and sexual assault.

In Baton Rouge, Louisiana, a city where the violent crime rate was nearly two and half times higher than the national average, a nonprofit was awarded about $1.5 million under the Biden push. That money went to fund a multipronged initiative providing vocational skills training, summer employment, financial literacy instruction and mentoring with the aim of reducing violence and recidivism.

Other cities and localities struggling with poverty and violence received funding for similar initiatives as part of a nationwide BJA program aiming to reduce violence in schools.

Margulies said such initiatives can be successful because they employ people living in neighborhoods affected by violence as mentors for others in the same communities, serving as credible messengers who are often able to deter violence or mediate resolutions between people who are arguing before it flares up. But he said those programs will likely be defunded during the new Trump administration.

"I hope I'm wrong," he said.

Representatives for the Trump-Vance transition team did not reply to requests for comments.

JC Hendrickson, a senior policy strategist at the Brennan Center for Justice, said the Biden administration blazed trails by pushing for more oversight in federal prisons and recidivism reduction programming for people who are incarcerated.

On July 25, four days after dropping out of the 2024 presidential race, Biden signed the Federal Prison Oversight Act, a bipartisan law that established an inspection regime for the Bureau of Prisons and created an ombudsman's office within the DOJ.

The law was passed in the wake of significant scandals at BOP facilities in recent years, including the high-profile convictions of officials at a women's prison in Oakland, California, for sexual abuse, the shuttering of a men's prison in Illinois notorious for civil rights violations and violence, and numerous prisoner suicides that were deemed a failure of prison policy and operations.

The Biden administration also significantly expanded a home confinement program that was created by the CARES Act, a stimulus bill under President Donald Trump enacted in 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The program moved federal inmates out of prisons into a form of house detention to allow them to reunite with families, reintegrate with their communities, work and attend school under various forms of supervision, including electronic monitoring.

Hendrickson said the program was "unprecedented" in reducing recidivism, defined as the commission of a new crime after having served a criminal sentence, to a rate of less than 1%. In comparison, the average recidivism rate for former federal inmates is around 40%.

"The Biden administration was really committed to this program," he said. "What it shows is that people can be held accountable without a prison sentence. You can still have accountability as you hold people accountable in communities, and that's what the CARES Act home confinement program does."

Experts say Biden will be remembered for his record-setting clemency actions.

Three days before leaving office, Biden commuted the sentences of nearly 2,500 people convicted of nonviolent drug offenses who were serving sentences that were much harsher than what they would be today. Those commutations came after he commuted the sentences of 1,500 people in December. In total, Biden commuted over 4,000 sentences and issued 65 pardons during his term, which combined make up the strongest act of clemency by any president. In comparison, Obama granted 1,715 commutations and 212 pardons during a time in office twice as long as Biden's.

Biden also commuted the sentences of 37 out of 40 people on federal death row to life in prison without parole, an effort that Robin M. Maher, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said was remarkable.

In the context of policing, Biden's greatest achievement was an executive order he signed in May 2022 that banned the use of chokeholds by federal law enforcement officers, and limited the use of so-called no-knock warrants, which allow police to enter a property without first announcing their presence. The executive order also restricted the transfer of military equipment to state and local law enforcement agencies and mandated the improvement of data collection on the use of force by federal agencies.

Another milestone was the signing in December of the same year of the Law Enforcement Deescalation and Training Act, a bipartisan law that secured federal funding for training officers on use of force alternatives and deescalation techniques, and how to better handle encounters with individuals having mental or suicidal crises.

On Jan. 15, then-U.S. Attorney General Merrick B. Garland announced the withdrawal of the federal government's lethal injection protocol based on concerns that the drug used in executions — pentobarbital — may cause unconstitutional pain and suffering to the condemned, including a suffocating sensation similar to that experienced during waterboarding. During Trump's first term, the pentobarbital protocol was used to execute 13 people.

Maher said Biden's acts of clemency and his decision to appoint Garland, who also issued a moratorium on federal executions in July 2021, are testament to the former president's efforts to try to end the death penalty.

"President Biden's decision to commute the death sentences of 37 men on the federal death row was an act of courage and conscience, a fitting coda to his transformation from zealous supporter of the death penalty to public skeptic," Maher told Law360 in an email. "At the same time, there are many who are disappointed that he did not push for abolition of the federal death penalty as he promised to do during his 2020 campaign, and by his decision not to commute all federal and military death sentences before leaving office."

Other analysts see Biden's achievements as meager for a president that made criminal justice reform a focal point of his election campaign in the aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd, which forced the nation to confront racism in policing.

Jillian Snider, an adjunct lecturer at John Jay College of Criminal Justice who served 13 years as an officer for the New York Police Department, said Biden largely fell short of delivering on many of the promises he made at the outset of his presidency.

"I am quite underwhelmed with his achievements," Snider said. "I don't really think that he has been able to accomplish all that he had committed to."

For instance, Snider said, Biden didn't succeed in brokering an elimination of mandatory minimum sentences, something he strongly advocated for, but which never obtained the necessary backing in Congress.

Snider, who testified before Congress on criminal justice issues, acknowledged that Biden's quest for reform occurred in a highly polarized environment and uncooperative lawmakers in Washington share some of the blame. Still, even within the realm of the executive power of the presidency, Biden missed important targets, she said.

For example, Biden failed to follow through on his stated support for reconsidering criminal penalties connected to cannabis offenses or for removing marijuana and its derivatives from the list of federally controlled substances. And, Snider noted, Biden's executive actions pardoning cannabis offenders only affected people in federal custody.

"We have way more people in [state] jails and prisons in America for cannabis than we do at the federal level," she said.

Moreover, Biden failed to meaningfully improve the relations between police and the public, or make policing more equitable and fair, Snider said, adding that the former president's executive orders on use of force and the deescalation bill barely made a dent.

"I believe that the president of the United States does not yield enough power to be able to completely transform policing, of course, but I do think that there wasn't an overt effort taken on his office or himself to try and better police community relationships" she said.

Representatives for Biden's White House and the DOJ did not respond to requests for comments.

Snider said Trump, Biden's predecessor who is back in the White House, had a more constructive relationship with chiefs of police and police commissioners during his first time, which trickled down to the rank-and-file officers, boosting morale. Before Trump, President Barack Obama was more vocal than Biden, in both positive and critical ways, about law enforcement.

"Right now, we're at a pretty considerable low in terms of morale. Agencies are basically scrounging around to make sure that they could fill seats and have enough officers to patrol their jurisdiction. And I think that the Biden administration really didn't take much notice of that," said Snider, who worked as a patrol officer and later in undercover operations, street-level narcotics, and field intelligence positions.

Snider said Trump achieved more in reforming criminal justice by signing the First Step Act, which reduced mandatory minimum sentences for certain drug offenses and expanded rehabilitation options in federal prisons, a law that was hailed by reform advocates across the political spectrum as a major milestone.

She also questioned the timing of Biden's latest pardons and commutations, which came in the waning hours of his mandate and after he issued a full and unconditional pardon to his son for gun and tax evasion felonies, adding that the former president was moved more by an interest in how he could be perceived by critics than by his own clemency.

"What took so long?" Snider said. "That's a big win for people who have been sitting in prison hoping for a pardon or hoping for their sentence to be commuted, but it took a really long time, and again, what was the motivation behind that?"

In the early stage of Biden's presidency, criminal justice reform advocates hoped that he would change the way the clemency process works, taking it away from the DOJ and assigning it to a bipartisan board advising the president. That didn't happen.

Hendrickson said Biden's sweeping clemency action last month, which involved people who were placed in home confinement, can serve as a blueprint for future administrations by serving as a successful example of how this alternative to prison can be used more widely for detainees who show an interest in rehabilitation and are not violent.

Hendrickson praised other aspects of Biden's record on criminal justice reform, for instance his endorsement of legislation that would have eliminated sentencing disparities between offenses involving crack cocaine and those involving other drugs. He also highlighted a memorandum, issued by Garland earlier in Biden's presidency, that required federal prosecutors to seek sentences equally, regardless of which drug was involved in a defendant's criminal case.

Moreover, Biden's executive actions restored the issuance of Pell Grants to incarcerated people. These grants help students with financial needs pay for college. He also implemented another law signed by Trump — the Fair Chance Act — which banned federal employers from asking job applicants about their criminal histories before making a conditional job offer.

Despite the achievements, Hendrickson noted areas where Biden lacked leadership.

For instance, Hendrickson said, Biden didn't do enough to limit the practice of solitary confinement, which remains widely used within the federal prison system. Another missed opportunity was his delay in appointing members to the U.S. Sentencing Commission, a panel of jurists that sets penalties for federal crimes, which has rolled into Trump's second presidency with vacancies.

"It's really important," Hendrickson said. "The commission, when it doesn't have a quorum, is not able to update guidelines and set policy."

Daniel Landsman, a vice president of policy at nonprofit Families Against Mandatory Minimums Foundation, told Law360 that a president can't change or eliminate mandatory minimums, which are set by federal law, without congressional action, but could use executive authority — in the form of DOJ policy — to ensure they are not triggered in particular instances. In his memorandum, Garland instructed federal prosecutors to charge crack cocaine offenses as if the weight threshold was the same as powder cocaine.

This move by the DOJ effectively eliminated the sentencing disparity between the two types of the same drug under criminal law, equalizing the amount of narcotic necessary to trigger mandatory minimum sentences. It reduced the prior 18:1 ratio set by law — with a five-year prison sentence being triggered by distribution of either 500 grams of powder cocaine or 28 grams of crack cocaine — to a 1:1 ratio.

The policy change made it harder for people charged with dealing crack, whose consumers tend to be disproportionally people of color compared with those of powder cocaine, to face the mandatory minimums. Landsman said it was a positive step.

But in other aspects of criminal sentencing policy, Biden took the opposite tack. For instance, when proposed legislation in Congress sought to include fentanyl-related substances among its controlled substances — which in turn would have expanded mandatory minimum sentences to cover offenses involving those substances — the Biden administration vaguely supported the bill while saying nothing about the criminal penalty repercussions.

Landsman said Biden's stance on the issue contradicted his campaign promises.

"They were not working in alignment with previous comments on eliminating mandatory minimums," he said. "That's an area where I felt the administration fell a little short."

--Editing by Orlando Lorenzo. Graphics by Ben Jay.