The Guardian has this lengthy new article on federal drug crime policies headlined "How Jeff Sessions and Donald Trump have restarted the war on drugs." I find the headline frustrating because the federal government never really ended the "war on drugs" so it is misguided to suggest something that never stopped has been restarted. That lingo notwithstanding, the extended piece provides a useful primer on recent drug war developments during the Obama and Trump era, and here are excerpts:
Barack Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, [in 2013] was pushing through a set of “smart on crime” reforms that included directing federal prosecutors to avoid triggering mandatory minimum sentences when dealing with lower-level, nonviolent drug offenders. For many years research and advocacy groups had opposed mandatory minimum sentences as cripplingly expensive, marked by racial disparities and of dubious value for crime prevention. But the laws were still on the books and the federal prison population continued to grow.
Holder was announcing that federal prosecutors were being instructed to use minimum sentences in fewer, and more serious, cases. Central to this push for change, said America’s first black attorney general, was the evidence that America’s harsh drug enforcement had fallen more heavily on African Americans....
In May [2017], Sessions reversed his predecessor’s initiative, claiming, without evidence, that Holder’s sentencing changes had led to America’s sudden 10.8% increase in murders in 2015.... What is so striking about the move by Sessions and the Trump administration is that it is at odds with much thinking across the globe about the war on drugs, including among leaders in Latin America. Ever since 2011 when Juan Manuel Santos, as the president of Colombia, declared that the war on drugs had failed, a growing international consensus has been forming on the need for a new conversation to discuss the violence, bloodshed and ruined lives that followed in the wake of the war on drugs – whether in Colombia, Mexico or America.
The change in direction in the US has come at a time when America has been also seeing an increasing number of states liberalizing laws on the consumption and sale of marijuana. Into this evolving international and national context has stepped Sessions, with a very different approach. The new attorney general and his initiatives represent a huge setback for advocates who have worked for decades to build bipartisan agreement that America’s war on drugs had been a failure and it was time to reverse the damage....
For decades, reciting law and order slogans has been the path of least resistance for politicians -- and the policymakers who sign such harsh legislation have not been held responsible for its consequences. “I am unaware of any legislator who has gotten into political trouble for codifying a simple-minded slogan or soundbite that pushes up the incarceration rate with no effect on crime,” says Bobby Scott, an African American Democratic congressman from Virginia who has been fighting for a better approach to criminal justice since he was first elected in 1993. “I am aware of many politicians who voted for intelligent, research-based initiatives that reduce crime and save money, and because they’re labeled ‘soft on crime’ they get in political trouble.”
In recent years, driven by the enormous price tag of mass incarceration for taxpayers, reforming America’s criminal justice system has become a bipartisan effort, with the Republican mega-donor Koch brothers and the advocacy group Right on Crime supporting the cause, and conservative states like Texas leading the way on reducing their prison populations. Rick Perry, the former Texas governor who now serves as Trump’s energy secretary, was one of the many Republicans who signed on to these reforms. “After 40 years of the war on drugs, I can’t change what happened in the past,” he said at the World Economic Forum in 2014. “What I can do as the governor of the second largest state in the nation is to implement policies that start us toward a decriminalization and keeps people from going to prison and destroying their lives, and that’s what we’ve done.”... “
You are never going to win the war on drugs. Drugs won,” Koch Industries executive Mark Holden told reporters in Colorado in June, expressing frustration at Sessions’ return to war on drugs policies and rhetoric. “Illegal drug usage is at the same or higher levels now than it was when we started the war on drugs,” Holden, who leads the Koch criminal justice reform efforts, told the Guardian. “We need to go to a different approach.”
Sessions’ rollback of Holder’s sentencing reforms has been hailed by some law enforcement groups, and the Justice Department has also defended Sessions’ changes by pointing to his backing from people “actually on the front lines dealing with violent criminals on a daily basis”. Among Sessions’ supporters in law enforcement are the Fraternal Order of Police (the nation’s most prominent police union), the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, and the National Association of Assistant US Attorneys, which represents the frontline federal prosecutors whom Holder had tried to rein in.
Larry Leiser, the national association’s president, says that many federal prosecutors believe that tough mandatory minimum sentences are a crucial tool in convincing lower-level drug defendants to cooperate with the government when it’s prosecuting the higher-ups involved with the criminal activity. “The tools we have [to tackle drugs and violence] are the tools that Congress has created for us, Leiser says. “We’re just trying to hold on to the ones we’ve got.”
“Some organizations and people like to make these drug traffickers the victims. What about the people whose lives they kill and the lives they destroy?” Leiser asks. “We’ve lost our way on this issue; we’ve failed to focus on the victims.”... Leiser and Patrick O’Carroll, the executive director of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, both say they believe the Obama administration’s modest criminal justice reforms are connected to 2015’s increase in murders. “If you have less drugs in the marketplace, there are less people dying and fighting over the drugs, and you’re going to have less murders,” Leiser says.
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