Every April since President Donald Trump signed the first proclamation in 2018, Second Chance Month has served as an annual reminder to recognize the potential of people with criminal records to turn their lives around. The First Step Act of 2018 remains one of President Trump’s most important legacies from his first term. It has been a tremendous success by virtually any measure, and it’s part of a critical but underserved area of legislative reform.

What’s more, it was bipartisan and remains extraordinarily popular.

Polling indicates that most Americans recognize our criminal justice system needs reform — perhaps because Americans also recognize that the success or failure of our criminal justice system has direct implications for them personally.

A striking 81% of likely voters in 2024 said they’d support reforms to the criminal justice system, with the numbers almost equally high across political affiliations. More than three-quarters of Republicans signaled support. Upwards of 80% of Democrats and Independents did as well.

That’s because Americans understand that a functioning criminal justice system has little to do with ideology. It’s about ensuring the institutions we rely on to keep us safe, free, and flourishing do what they were originally created to do.

Continuing to refine and modernize our justice system not only offers Trump a widely-supported opportunity to better the nation; it’s also a chance for him to further cement his legacy as a transformational reformer of American government.

There’s already a promising roster of legislation filed in Congress that would serve as a worthy follow-up to President Trump’s successes in 2018. Take the Federal Prison Oversight Act, the Clean Slate Act, and the Safer Supervision Act as examples. All three would serve as crucial steps toward lasting, system-level reform of our criminal justice system.

The Federal Prison Oversight Act created an oversight body to inspect and regulate federal prisons — but it hasn’t gone into practical effect yet, due in part to funding issues.

Safer, more effective, more accountable federal prisons wouldn’t only benefit the prison staff and population. It would benefit us all. After all, where do incarcerated men and women go after serving their term? They return to us as neighbors. As co-workers. As fellow citizens.

As such, we must ensure that our correctional facilities are, in fact, corrective, not merely punitive.

The American criminal justice system was never meant to become a multibillion-dollar taxpayer-funded industry. And it was never meant to be a self-perpetuating parallel state. It was intended to protect the common good, mete out justice, and return citizens to their communities after they had served a rightly-determined sentence in reparation for their crime.

We should hold people accountable for their mistakes, as we owe it to victims and the public to ensure there are consequences for causing harm. But when we make the path of a law-abiding life more attainable for those who have demonstrated their commitment to rehabilitation, we create a society that is safer and more prosperous for everyone. This should ring true to all of us, regardless of political inclination.

Employment is one of the biggest challenges for those reentering society from jail or prison. Workforce training programs tailored for those returning from incarceration should be expanded and fully funded. Technology offers promising new opportunities, with one study finding that the use of a virtual reality interface to train people in prison on job interviewing contributed to more job offers and lower recidivism upon release.

Tens of millions of Americans have a criminal record, including half of those who are unemployed. Too often, that record functions as a life sentence long after their official sentence has ended. When criminal records are barriers to employment, housing, and education, millions are kept from ever fully reintegrating into society.

One way to alleviate these barriers is to institutionalize automatic record-clearing for eligible individuals through “Clean Slate” laws, which automatically expunge or seal low-level records after a certain period of time for those whose arrests don’t result in convictions or who have remained crime-free. While a dozen states — like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Utah — have enacted this policy, nationwide adoption would eliminate bureaucratic red tape preventing people from moving past their records and contributing more to society.

In addition to implementing job training programs and Clean Slate laws, Congress is also considering the Safer Supervision Act, which would help streamline and reform an overwhelmed and arcane system trying to execute and make decisions about post-incarceration supervision. The Safer Supervision Act would reduce the size of the government, reduce costs, and even reduce recidivism.

Second Chance Month is a useful tool to raise awareness, but it should be seen as the floor, not the ceiling. By implementing policies that support job-training, record-clearing, and community reintegration, we can see to it that second chances are more than just feel-good ceremonies for one month on the calendar. We as a nation — and Trump as our president — have a chance to make our justice system just again.

Timothy Head is the president and CEO of Unify.US and the former executive director at the Faith & Freedom Coalition.