Kim Kardashian West will meet with officials, including senior adviser Jared Kushner, at the White House on Wednesday to discuss prison reform. It’s not clear if Kardashian West will meet with President Donald Trump.
The entrepreneur and reality television star has advocated for a pardon for Alice Marie Johnson, a 62-year-old great-grandmother serving a life sentence without parole for a first-time drug offense. She has already served more than 20 years in prison.
Prison reform is an issue near and dear to Kushner, whose father, Charles, spent more than a year in a federal prison camp in 2005 and 2006 on charges of tax evasion, illegal campaign contributions, and witness tampering. When Jared joined the White House as senior adviser, he vowed to help improve the system that his father had come through. And so, while other initiatives in his once-dizzying portfolio have fallen by the wayside, Kushner has made significant progress in getting Republican lawmakers on board with the effort. He pushed Congress to support a bipartisan bill known as the First Step Act, which aims to better prepare inmates to re-enter society by incentivizing participation in job-training and drug-treatment programs, and which would also give nonviolent offenders more options to serve the ends of their sentences in halfway houses or home confinement. (Kushner’s father left prison 10 months early, and finished his two-year sentence at a halfway house in Newark, New Jersey.)
“If we can start showing that we can make the prisons more purposeful and more effective at lowering the recidivism rate over time, that may help the people who are trying to make the argument for sentencing reform,” Kushner said at an event in the East Room earlier this month.
Kardashian’s plea, and Kushner’s push for reform, are at odds with the Trump administration’s own policies. In one of his first moves as attorney general, Jeff Sessions rescinded an Obama-era memo that increased leniency for low-level drug offenders, instructing federal prosecutors to bring punitive charges that could trigger precisely the sort of tough mandatory sentencing that condemned Johnson to life without parole.
Kardashian West has said she supported Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, but her husband, Kanye West, has signaled his support for Trump.
Kardashian West’s White House visit was earlier reported by Vanity Fair.
