Mass incarceration is a blight on our nation’s reputation. The so-called Drug War has been an abject failure. Both Republican and Democratic politicians have reached across the aisle to address this issue. Then, along came our new Attorney General Jeff Sessions. May 10, he issued a memorandum for all federal prosecutors outlining the new charging and sentencing policy.
“First, it is a core principle that prosecutors should charge and pursue the most serious, readily provable offense,” it read in part. “By definition, the most serious offenses are those that carry the most substantial guidelines sentence, including mandatory minimum sentences. ... Second, prosecutors must disclose to the sentencing court all facts that impact the sentencing guidelines or mandatory minimum sentences, and should in all cases seek a reasonable sentence.”
This is a major step back in our nation’s efforts to overhaul the criminal justice system.
“Sessions’s memo replaced the orders of former Attorney General Eric Holder, who in 2013 took aim at drug sentencing rules,” reported The New York Times’ Rebecca R. Ruiz May 12. “He encouraged prosecutors to consider the individual circumstances of a case and to exercise discretion in charging drug crimes. In cases of nonviolent defendants with insignificant criminal histories and no connections to criminal organizations, Holder instructed prosecutors to omit details about drug quantities from charging documents so as not to trigger automatically harsh penalties.”
We here in Indiana have seen a microcosm of this reversal with our own former governor and current Vice President Mike Pence. Starting with the state's 2014 criminal sentencing reform, we had been making progress. Pence undid all that last year.
“[Pence] signed into law House Enrolled Act 1235, reinstating a 10-year mandatory minimum prison term for a person convicted of dealing meth or heroin who has a prior conviction for cocaine, meth or heroin dealing,” reported Dan Carden of The Times of Northwest Indiana March 21, 2016. “More concerning for some lawmakers, including state Sen. Karen Tallian, D-Ogden Dunes, is Pence reversing course on his past actions to eliminate mandatory minimums by now reducing the ability of judges to issue the appropriate sentence for each criminal and giving prosecutors the upper hand in plea bargaining with an accused. … Pence also signed Senate Enrolled Act 290, classifying as a drug dealer any person caught with 28 grams of a controlled substance or more than 10 pounds of marijuana, even if there is no other evidence the person is selling drugs.”
Mandatory minimums unfairly punish nonviolent offenders with unnecessarily harsh sentences. These policies hurt more than just the convicts themselves, but also the families, friends and communities they leave behind while incarcerated. The longer they are away the harder it is to reintegrate into society when they do return. We know these draconian approaches don’t work because we’ve already tried them.