Have you read the exit interview with Attorney General Eric Holder? It's quite revealing and also puzzling.
On his accomplishments:
In January 2013 I told the people in the Justice Department after the re-election that I wanted to focus on reforming the federal criminal justice system. I made an announcement in August of that year in San Francisco, when we rolled out the Smart on Crime initiative. It was a way of breaking some really entrenched thinking and asking prosecutors, investigators, the bureaucracy – to think about how we do our jobs in a different way – to ask the question of whether excessively long prison sentences for nonviolent offenders really served any good purpose, how we used enhancement papers1, moving discretion to prosecutors and asking them to make individualized determinations about what they should do in cases, as opposed to have some big policy sent to them from Washington.
So, he asked for officials in the justice system to rethink harsh penalties for nonviolent crimes, but he himself didn't see fit to set a new policy?
On his disappointments:
I’m proud of the fact that – in 2010, I guess – we reduced that ratio, the crack-powder ratio2, from 100-to-1 to about 17- or 18-to-1. I’m still disappointed that, given the lack of a pharmacological distinction between crack and cocaine, the ratio is not 1-to-1. You know, it was the product of a lot of hard work that the president was intimately involved in. But I think he would agree with me that that number should be at 1-to-1.
That is something that I know the president believes in, that I believe in. One of the things that I’d like to see happen before the end of this administration is that there would be a drug court [an alternative to criminal courts for suspects whose main problem is addiction] in every district in this country.
Decriminalization and treating addiction as a health issue would help out quite a lot with that too.
On why he hasn't called for the decriminalization of marijuana, especially considering the disproportionate impact of pot sentencing on the excessive incarceration of black Americans:
I think the question of how these drugs get scheduled and how they are ultimately treated is something for Congress to work on. I think we’ve pushed. We have done an awful lot. You look at what’s going on now in Colorado and Washington5 and the way we’ve dealt with those initiatives, identifying the eight priority areas6 that we thought still would warrant federal involvement, and yet if you look at where we are now with those states and with what other states are doing, and the way we view the whole issue of the use of medical marijuana, we’re in a fundamentally different place than we were when Barack Obama became president and I became attorney general.
So I think we’ve made significant progress in looking at that drug in a more realistic way. But I think our society has to ask itself the question of how ultimately we are going to view the use of marijuana.
The enforcement policies that this administration has undertaken, in its decision not to sue, for example, in Colorado – not to try to preempt those laws in Colorado and Washington – really shows leadership....
So the most you could do was restrain yourself from fighting state-based decisions to decriminalize? That's leadership!
On mass incarceration and the emerging bipartisan consensus to reverse it:
It’s both jaw-dropping and heart-warming to see that an issue that is that important can get people from such disparate political views together. To think that you can have Rick Perry, Eric Holder, Rand Paul, Newt Gingrich, Dick Durbin, Patrick Leahy all essentially agreeing....with the basic notion that mass incarceration is not financially sustainable and also is not just, not fair....
We have 5 percent of the world’s population, 25 percent of the people in incarceration. That’s not something that we can sustain. One third of the budget at the Justice Department now goes to the Bureau of Prisons, and if you look out to 2020, it goes up to 40, 45 percent or so. Which squeezes out the other things we want to do with regard to other areas of crime that we want to focus on, other initiatives that we want to support.
And then if you look at the impact that mass incarceration has on communities from which these people are extracted, it leads to broken families, it leads to social dysfunction, it tends to breed more crime. So – look, I’m a prosecutor first and foremost, and as a judge I put people in jail for extended periods of time when that was appropriate. Smart on Crime says if you commit violent crimes you should go to jail, and go to jail for extended periods of time. For people who are engaged in non-violent crimes – any crimes, for that matter – we are looking for sentences that are proportionate to the conduct that you engaged in....
You know, this war on drugs that we’ve been involved in for 30, 35 years…. We have not considered all the collateral impacts of the war on drugs, and I think people are now prepared to do that, and not tar the people who are asking these questions with being "soft on crime."
So you know the war on drugs is financially draining, unfair, ineffective, and destructive to communities, but you are "looking for sentences that are proportionate"? How about ending it, and fighting for what you believe in instead of waiting until people aren't going to call you names for trying to accomplish what you know is right?
On the underfunding of access to justice:
We have, to the extent that we could, funded different ideas around the country, tried to raise the consciousness of various states, usually through their court systems, to fund indigent defense.... The people who work for me, assistant U.S. attorneys in many of our offices, have caseloads that are way too large, but, boy, you look at the average public defender, and the amount of time that they are allowed to spend with a client before they have to enter into a courtroom and try to zealously defend that person – those caseloads are just, well, they’re just unbearable. Just unbearable. That is something that we have to fix....
[T]here is a growing consensus that it’s the right thing to do for a whole bunch of reasons. It’s the morally right thing to do, and ultimately it saves us money in the long run.
Again, waiting for the country to come around to the idea instead of being a champion for it, bringing it to the conscience of the country?
On the privatization of prisons and immigration detention:
You know, I suppose it can be done well. But I am a person who believes that that’s essentially a state function, a government function. I think it’s done best by well-funded, well-led governmental entities....
[W]hat I hear about, documented cases that have been presented to me about the way in which people who are in the system for immigration reasons – as opposed to drug selling or violent crime – and the way in which people are treated, the conditions under which they are held. That is, I think, extremely troublesome.... This is another place where we are going to look in the mirror and ask ourselves, who are we as a nation? Are we prepared to devote governmental resources to that issue?
I would have thought the Attorney General of the United States might have some say in how that goes. I guess, nah.
On why the Justice Department hasn't gotten involved in the litigation in state use of lethal injection drugs for the death penalty:
What the president has asked me to do is to review the death penalty. Among the things we’re looking at are the protocols that we use. There’s essentially been a moratorium in the federal system, and given the issues that we have around these questions of drugs, where you get them, it will be interesting to see how that moratorium ultimately resolves itself.
This is something the president has asked me to look at. My hope is to have a report on his desk before I leave as attorney general, both with regard to the protocols and the policy behind the death penalty...
A report that will eventually be submitted on your way out the door isn't really an answer to the botched death sentences being carried out now. I guess he doesn't have a view on them one way or the other. He seems like a passive observer, without really any stake or influence in the matter.
On the death penalty and wrongly executed persons:
We have the greatest judicial system in the world, but at the end of the day it’s made up of men and women making decisions, tough decisions. Men and women who are dedicated, but dedicated men and women can make mistakes. And I find it hard to believe that in our history that has not happened.
I think at some point, we will find a person who was put to death and who should not have been, who was not guilty of a crime.
All I can think is that he's maybe suffering some form of PTSD after being under attack by right-wingers over bizarre conspiracy theories for the past five years. He sounds like he's been beaten down into utter passivity.
Please go have a nice long rest, Eric Holder. It sounds like you need it.