This fact cannot be overstated: appointing Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III as attorney general of the United States was an incredibly bad idea. As if his very long history of racism, ties to white supremacy and support of homophobia weren’t enough, his most recent vote against reauthorizing the Violence Against Women’s Act (VAWA) should have told us everything we needed to know about lack of intention to protect America’s minorities. Last week, Session’s gave us some insight into his emerging priorities at the Department of Justice when he ordered the department to review its reform agreements with police departments around the country, essentially indicating that he has no real intention to police the police—despite the fact that reports emerging from Ferguson, Chicago and Baltimore show us that policing is in desperate need of reform. And yet, there’s more. Now it looks like he fully intends to bring back the war on drugs. Yes, the very same war on drugs that we know was responsible for locking up nearly an entire segment of the population and making the United States the world’s leader in mass incarceration as we know it.
Law enforcement officials say that Sessions and [Steven H. Cook, one of Session’s top aide’s at the Justice Department] are preparing a plan to prosecute more drug and gun cases and pursue mandatory minimum sentences. The two men are eager to bring back the national crime strategy of the 1980s and ’90s from the peak of the drug war, an approach that had fallen out of favor in recent years as minority communities grappled with the effects of mass incarceration.
Crime is near historic lows in the United States, but Sessions says that the spike in homicides in several cities, including Chicago, is a harbinger of a “dangerous new trend” in America that requires a tough response.
This is incredibly problematic and extremely dangerous. Decades later, what we now know about the war on drugs is that it disproportionately tore black and brown families apart and sent many first-time offenders and low-level drug offenders to prison for long sentences and, in some cases, for life. And it wasn’t without cost—both in economical terms and in terms of the devastation it has done to our population.
Sentencing reform advocates say the tough crime policies went too far. The nation began incarcerating people at a higher rate than any other country — jailing 25 percent of the world’s prisoners at a cost of $80 billion a year. The nation’s prison and jail population more than quadrupled from 500,000 in 1980 to 2.2 million in 2015, filled with mostly black men strapped with lengthy prison sentences — 10 or 20 years, sometimes life without parole for a first drug offense.
And, of course because everything Sessions seems to do is totally contradictory and unclear, what about those states that have legalized marijuana? How will this newly resurrected drug war prosecute cases in those states? For Republicans whose entire platform used to be about small government and state’s rights, they certainly seem to be okay with big government and intrusion into people’s privacy on the issues they deem relevant. How hypocritical!
In his effort to resurrect the practices of the drug war, it is still unclear what Sessions will do about the wave of states that have legalized marijuana in recent years. Eight states and the District of Columbia now permit the recreational use of marijuana, and 28 states and the District have legalized the use of medical marijuana.
This is incredibly bad, folks. As if there weren’t enough people in America locked up already, Jeff Sessions and his racist cronies over at the Department of Justice are about to declare a really unnecessary war. And in this so-called war on drugs, people of color, specifically black people, are about to be once again caught in the crosshairs.