Addicted to punishment

In his odd, antediluvian manner, is Attorney General Jeff Sessions doing the country a favor? In the short term, no, but quite possibly in the long term — if, sparked by the AG’s retrograde criminal-justice instincts, members of Congress finally grow the courage to fix inflexibly punitive federal drug laws that intelligent Republicans and Democrats alike now disavow.

Sessions, breaking with that new consensus, last week told federal prosecutors in drug cases to pursue the top provable charge carrying the highest possible penalty, no matter the alleged crime.

That scrapped a four-year-old Justice Department directive by AG Eric Holder urging U.S. attorneys to exercise discretion by considering the individual circumstances in a case, so as not to always trigger draconian mandatory minimums.

The sudden shift will result, as Kentucky GOP Sen. Rand Paul put it, in “ruining more lives.”

Lives of people like Leo Guthmiller, a 28-yearold resident of Lincoln, Neb. The recovering drug-user — sober for more than two years — was arrested after two users named him as the person who introduced them to their meth dealer.

Because the meth in the transaction exceeded 500 grams, Guthmiller immediately became subject to a federal mandatory minimum — and is now serving 10 years in federal lock-up, under a sentence his judge, lacking any latitude to lessen it, called “absolutely ridiculous.”

Strict adherence to mandatory minimum drug penalties yields no crime-reduction dividends. About half of all U.S. states made their drug laws less reflexively punitive in recent years; almost across the board, crime rates have since declined. After Holder relaxed the federal guidelines, drug crimes nationally dropped.

The no-wiggle-room punishments do, however, cost taxpayers untold and unnecessary billions for incarceration.

And — this gets us to the unintentional favor Sessions may be doing the country — lay bare the racially tinged schizophrenia of a nation that increasingly seeks to get treatment to opioid addicts, even as it recommits to tough punishment against other drug users and small-time dealers.

That the Department of Justice has now returned to a drug-war footing should spur the bipartisan coalition that championed reform a year ago to reassemble, with renewed sense of mission.

Congress can’t change the AG. But it can and should change the laws.