Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Tough sentencing push called ‘dumb on crime’
WASHINGTON — Ordering federal prosecutors on Friday to crack down on drug offenders, Attorney General Jeff Sessions made clear he wants the Justice Department to turn the clock back to an earlier, tougher era in the fourdecades-long war on drugs.
In a memo, Sessions said federal prosecutors should “charge and pursue the most serious, readily provable offense” in drug cases, even when that would trigger mandatory sentencing requirements.
Mandatory sentencing laws for drug users have been controversial for years, and many Republicans as well as Democrats now oppose them as unfair, ineffective and too costly.
The new Justice Department policy cancels the Obama administration’s attempts to pull back on harsh sentencing strategies, which had produced a huge growth in prison populations. It restores some language from a 2003 memo written by thenAttorney General John Ashcroft.
Speaking Friday at the Justice Department, Sessions said the crackdown was “a key part of President Trump’s promise to keep America safe,” linking drug trafficking to increased homicide rates in some cities.
“We are returning to the enforcement of the law as passed by Congress — plain and simple,” Sessions said.
Sessions rescinded policy memos signed in 2013 and 2014 by then-Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. that instructed prosecutors to reserve the toughest charges for high-level traffickers and violent criminals.
Since then, the federal prison population has dropped by about 14 percent, to 188,797 inmates this month, along with the number of drug offenders sentenced to mandatory minimum sentences.
Holder slammed Sessions’ policy Friday, calling it “ideologically motivated” and not supported by facts.
“The policy announced today is not tough on crime,” Holder said. “It is dumb on crime.”
The new policy threatens to halt a push for bipartisan criminal justice reform that has been led by some of Trump’s closest advisers and embraced by key Republicans on Capitol Hill, including House Speaker Paul Ryan.
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., criticized the new policy Friday, arguing that mandatory minimum sentences disproportionately targeted minorities because of how different drugs are categorized under the law.
The “new policy will accentuate that injustice,” Paul said in a statement.
“Sessions is an outlier in his own party and even among many of his own colleagues in the administration,” said Inimai Chettiar, a director at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law in New York. “A lot of Republicans support reductions in sentencing.”
Indiana implemented a comprehensive criminal justice reform package when Vice President Mike Pence was governor.
“I would say that we need to adopt criminal justice reform nationally. We have got to do a better job recognizing and correcting the errors in the system that do reflect institutional bias in criminal justice,” Pence said in a campaign debate last year.
As governor of Texas, Trump’s Energy Secretary Rick Perry guided his state through a major shift in sentencing away from the kind of harsh penalties that Sessions seeks to restore in federal courts.
In those states and others, alarm at the escalating cost of incarceration helped drive calls for reform.
But Sessions, a former federal prosecutor in Alabama, was never on board with the push.
As a U.S. senator from Alabama, he helped kill a proposed sentencing reform bill, warning the legislation could lead to more felons on the streets. He also helped block a 2016 bill that would eased federal sentencing for using marijuana.
Since joining the Trump administration, Sessions has reversed an Obama administration attempt to phase out federal contracts with private prisons, saying the cells will be needed for the boost in inmate population he sees coming.
Under mandatory sentencing laws, judges have little discretion on how to sentence drug offenders. Prosecutors’ decisions on charging often determine how long offenders will spend in prison.
For example, if federal prosecutors include the amount of drugs in their written charges, that can trigger a mandatory minimum sentence.