Sessions calls for harsher penalties
Advocates criticize move as revival of the worst aspects of the war on drugs.
WASHINGTON — Attorney General Jeff Sessions is directing federal prosecutors to pursue the most serious charges possible against the vast majority of suspects, a reversal of Obama-era policies that is sure to send more people to prison and for much longer terms.
“This policy affirms our responsibility to enforce the law, is moral and just, and produces consistency,” Sessions wrote in a memo to U.S. attorneys made public early Friday.
Advocates quickly criticized the move as a revival of the worst aspects of the drug wars.
“It looks like we’re going to fill the prisons back up after finally getting the federal prison population down,” said Kevin Ring, president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums. “But the social and human costs will be much higher.”
The announcement is an unmistakable undoing of Obama administration criminal justice policies that aimed to ease overcrowding in federal prisons.
Sessions contends a spike in violence in some big cities and the nation’s opioid epidemic show the need for a return to tougher tactics.
He foreshadowed the plan early in his tenure, when he signaled his strong support for the federal government’s continued use of private prisons, reversing another Obama directive to phase out their use.
“We know that drugs and crime go hand-in-hand,” Sessions said in a Friday speech. “Drug trafficking is an inherently violent business. If you want to collect a drug debt, you can’t file a lawsuit in court. You collect it by the barrel of a gun.”
The policy memo says prosecutors should “charge and pursue the most serious, readily provable offense” — something more likely to trigger mandatory minimum sentences. Those rules limit a judge’s discretion and are typically dictated by the quantity of drugs involved in a crime.
The memo concedes there will be cases in which “good judgment” will warrant a prosecutor veering from that rule. And Sessions said it gives prosecutors “discretion to avoid sentences that would result in an injustice.”
The directive rescinds guidance by Sessions’ Democratic predecessor, Eric Holder, who told prosecutors they could in some cases leave drug quantities out of charging documents so as not to charge suspects with crimes that trigger long sentences.
Some prosecutors felt constrained by the Holder directive and expressed concern that they’d lose plea bargaining leverage — and a key inducement for cooperation — without the ability to more freely pursue mandatory minimum sentences.
The reversal gives prosecutors better tools to go after drug traffickers and gangs, said Lawrence Leiser, head of the National Association of Assistant U.S. Attorneys. Defense attorneys disagreed. Barry Pollack, head of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, said the new policy “marks a return to the failed policies of past administrations that caused mass incarceration, devastated families and communities, wasted untold millions of dollars and failed to make us any safer.”