Despite a bipartisan push to reduce the United States’ highest-in-the-world incarceration rate, the prison population decreased only slightly in 2018, the most recent year for which data is available. It was the last year in a slow but steady decade-long decline to the current population of 1.5 million.

During his State of the Union address, President Donald Trump praised himself for his work on criminal justice reform. “Our roaring economy has for the first time ever given many former prisoners the ability to get a great job and a fresh start,” he said. “This second chance at life is made possible because we passed landmark criminal justice reform into law. Everybody said that criminal justice reform couldn’t be done, but I got it done and the people in this room got it done.”

Yes, it’s true that Trump—the same man who recommended heavier enforcement of stop and frisk policing, and whose administration brought back the federal death penalty and fueled the expansion of private prisons—signed a much-heralded bill in 2018 to reform the federal criminal justice system, with broad bipartisan support. The First Step Act made changes that have reduced the federal prison population, and it was the first criminal justice reform bill to pass Congress in a generation. So far, the law has shortened the prison stays of about 2,500 people who were serving disproportionately long sentences for crack cocaine offenses, most of them African American. It has also let more than 3,000 people go home early because of their good behavior during incarceration. And it could lead to improvements in prison conditions.

But as Trump claims credit for freeing people from prison, there’s one very big problem that he’s not mentioning: His Justice Department is actively pushing to send some of these same people back behind bars, and to prevent others from reducing their sentences—which greatly limits who can benefit from the law that Trump has touted as one of his signature achievements.

So we've run essentially our traditional campaign, but on an aggressively truncated timeline, right? So in the immediate aftermath of the November 5 general election, we immediately went into what we call ballot curing, right? So there are tons of people with provisional ballots and mail-in ballots that were on the verge of being rejected for a number of reasons. And we would knock on their door and say, hey, we have reason to believe that your ballot is going to be rejected if you don't take your ID down to the county office, if you don't fill out this affidavit, if you don't go there and find your envelope, et cetera.

And then, immediately after ballot curing, we went into voter registration and registered about 7,000 young people and people of color across the state. And then after the voter registration deadline on December 7, we immediately went into sort of get-out-the-vote mode because early voting started December 14. And as it has been reported now across the country, we have blown through all kinds of turnout records for participation in runoff elections in Georgia. So we've been a little busy...

(LAUGHTER)

UFOT: ...Trying to make sure that as many people as possible show up again to vote in these runoffs.

We are looking at something like - we've cracked the 30% threshold for Black voters. Over 30% of the people who've shown up to vote early are African American voters. I would also add that we are looking at 115,000 people who voted in the runoff who did not vote in the 2020 general election. And over half of them are people of color. And about half of them are voters under the age of 40 - so between the ages of 18 and 39. So those are folks who did not vote in November.

Powerhouse lawyer turned top voter engagement strategist, Nse has been the force behind changing the political landscape in Georgia and she does it with such pizazz -- art shows, video game competitions. She makes voting fun -- all the cool kids are doing it. That’s why she’s on a mission to reshape the political landscape of Georgia, one voter at a time. In her role as the executive director of the New Georgia Project, she leads an ambitious effort to register 800,000 new voters of color and young people while cultivating civic engagement among through an innovative blend of technology, art and culture. In November (2019), the organization hosted Game Jam, a 72-hour video game contest focused on voter protection and engagement. By combining gaming and voting, they hope to increase black and brown youth participation in the civic and electoral process.

Nse’s experience as an immigrant from Nigeria has prepared her to fight for the American Dream to become a reality for everyone. She wants to know what Georgians care about, their hopes and aspirations and what keeps them up at night. Staying focused on people and their communities is the focus of New Georgia Project’s work in 2020. They plan to register 100,000 people of color to vote, help Georgia flip the State House from red to blue and make sure there is a full and accurate census count in the state so that hard to count populations have their needs met.