Jeff Sessions is what happens to the Department of Justice when we put someone in charge who doesn’t belong there and doesn’t actually care about justice. Though he’s only been in office for a relatively short time, we are about to see him undo the Obama-era progress on criminal justice reform and go back to waging a war on drugs which will only result in a whole bunch more black and brown bodies in prison. Of course, this (systemically using the law to disenfranchise minorities) is exactly what he intended to do with the DOJ all along. So it was never a question of “if” he was going to do these things so much as “when.”
Though Republicans love and buy into the racist dog whistles of “law and order,” in Washington, as it turns out, Democrats and Republicans alike were actually moving toward agreement on reducing drug sentences and mandatory minimums—that is until dear old Jeff came along.
Given Mr. Sessions’s long record as a zealous prosecutor and his well-known views on the dangers of drug use, his push to undo Obama-era sentencing policies and ramp up the war on drugs was hardly a surprise. But it was still striking, because it ran so contrary to the growing bipartisan consensus coursing through Washington and many state capitals in recent years — a view that America was guilty of excessive incarceration and that large prison populations were too costly in tax dollars and the toll on families and communities.
In an increasingly rare achievement, conservatives and liberals had come together on the issue, putting them on the verge of winning reductions in mandatory minimum sentences and creating new programs to help offenders adjust to life after prison. Given the success shown by similar changes at the state level, bipartisan majorities in the House and the Senate seemed eager to move ahead on the issue last year.
A diverse coalition of stakeholders emerged to unify for sentencing changes, although surely not without their own motivations (hello, Koch Industries!). Still, it is fact that incarcerating nonviolent offenders is a tremendous waste of money and resources, continues to divide families and criminalizes people long after their release.
“Locking up people who don’t pose a threat to public safety is a waste of taxpayer money, a waste of resources and doesn’t deter crime,” said Steve Hawkins, the president of the Coalition for Public Safety, a sentencing reform advocacy group whose partners are as diverse as the liberal Center for American Progress and the conservative FreedomWorks.
These organizations, along with Koch Industries, argued for sentencing changes as a way to save governments the huge costs of maintaining prisons and to make more productive contributors out of nonviolent offenders — a rare win-win for ideologically divided factions.
Even traditional Republican hardliners in the Senate, who were thinking of the opioid crisis that had begun hitting some of their own constituent groups, were coming around to the idea of less harsh sentencing. But not Jeff. He was looking for any and every opportunity to throw more black and brown folk in the slammer. Hell, if he couldn’t get them for voting fraud (which he has a history of trying to do), this felt like a slam dunk. He has remained unwavering in his opposition to any kind of reduction of mandatory minimums.
“He’s been the No. 1 opponent of the bipartisan effort in the Senate to reduce mandatory minimums for low-level nonviolent drug offenses,” said Senator Richard J. Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, who was one of the chief authors of the bipartisan bill.
Jeff Sessions is nothing if not laser-focused. He is intent on enacting his strategy of making legal discrimination and racism become policy under the Trump administration. While prosecutorial discretion remains intact, Sessions will make progress as difficult as he possibly can while he is in charge of the DOJ.