Time magazine has this new lengthy cover story on Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The whole piece is an interesting read, and here are some excerpts sentencing fans are likely to find of interest:
Sessions believes today’s low crime rates are a direct result of “proactive policing” and harsh sentences, and that dialing them back is causing crime to rise. According to the FBI, the violent crime rate rose 7% between 2014 and 2016, and the murder rate rose 20%, following years of decline.
Sessions has moved swiftly to unwind the Obama Justice Department’s policies. He canceled the “smart on crime” initiative and replaced it with a directive to pursue maximal charging and sentencing. He pulled out of the consent decrees and rescinded Holder’s hands-off marijuana-enforcement policy. He announced the end of DACA, stepped up deportation orders and sued California over sanctuary cities.
He has embraced Trump’s call to impose the death penalty on some drug dealers, which some legal scholars consider unconstitutional. Emphasizing treatment for drug addicts isn’t just ineffective, according to Sessions -- it’s dangerous. “The extraordinary surge in addiction and drug death is a product of a popular misunderstanding of the dangers of drugs,” he told me. “Because all too often, all we get in the media is how anybody who’s against drugs is goofy, and we just ought to chill out.”
In February, Sessions sent a letter warning the Senate that a bill to reduce federal sentences risked “putting the very worst criminals back into our communities.” (An outraged Chuck Grassley, the Republican Senator from Iowa, told reporters that if Sessions wanted to keep making laws, he should go back to elected office.) Sessions believes his erstwhile colleagues have been misled. “This whole mentality that there’s another solution other than incarceration,” he told me, “all I will say to you is, people today don’t know that every one of these things has been tried over the last 40 years.”
Sessions seemed exasperated when I asked him to address the disproportionate impact of harsh policing and incarceration on black families and communities. He cited the work of Heather Mac Donald, the controversial conservative scholar who argues that racial bias in the criminal-justice system is a myth and that the real problem is a “war on cops.” Mac Donald popularized the concept of the “Ferguson effect,” an unproven theory that crime rises when police feel hamstrung by political oversight. Sessions embraces this notion. In cities like Baltimore and Chicago, he told me, politicians “spend all that time attacking the police department instead of the criminals.”...
Sessions contends that the policies he champions help minority communities by cleaning up their neighborhoods. “If you do the map of your city and you’ve got five times the murders in a minority neighborhood, do you just go away?” he asked me, eyes narrowed. “Or do you prosecute the criminals who are committing the murders? That’s the fundamental answer. And the other thing is, you think the mothers who’ve got children, the older people who are afraid to walk to the grocery store -- shouldn’t they be free just like they are in the elite part of town?”
Sessions leaned over the plastic airplane table. “Whose side are you on?” he asked. “I’m on the victims’ side, and overwhelmingly the victims are minorities. The prosecution of certain minorities for murder, the victim is overwhelmingly another African American or Hispanic. It occurs within their own communities.” (Law-enforcement statistics show white criminals also tend to target white victims.)
His eyes gleamed as he sat back. “We are protecting minority citizens,” he concluded. “The fundamental question is, Who rules the streets? The government, or the outlaws?”
Comments
Post a Comment