An unintended consequence of the war on drugs: Mandatory minimum sentences that prevailed through the 1980s and 1990s filled federal prisons with low-level offenders, at great expense to taxpayers and to the country’s black and Hispanic communities. Cities, meanwhile, did not get safer.
An unintended consequence of the war on drugs: Mandatory minimum sentences that prevailed through the 1980s and 1990s filled federal prisons with low-level offenders, at great expense to taxpayers and to the country’s black and Hispanic communities. Cities, meanwhile, did not get safer.
In 2013, then-U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder changed course, announcing a Smart on Crime initiative that sought shorter sentences for nonviolent drug offenders and reserved tougher charges for violent criminals and high-level drug traffickers. Federal prosecutors stopped throwing the book at small-fry defendants without ties to gangs or cartels.
That approach won broad backing because it sought to counter the social devastation caused by mass incarceration while directing resources to efforts that would have the greatest impact on the illegal drug trade.
The result: The federal prison population dropped from 220,000 in 2013 to a current level of 188,797 as of this month — the first time in 40 years that the number of federal inmates has gone down.
That trend is sure be reversed as Jeff Sessions, President Donald Trump’s attorney general, returns to the less forgiving drug policies of the past.
Earlier this month, Sessions rescinded Holder’s initiative and embraced a return to mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenders. He ordered federal prosecutors to “charge and pursue the most serious, readily provable offense,” a move that takes away prosecutors’ discretion and boxes the courts into imposing the severest penalties on nonviolent, low-level offenders.
“Drug trafficking is an inherently violent business,” Sessions said earlier this month. “If you want to collect a drug debt, you can’t file a lawsuit in court. You collect it by the barrel of a gun.”
We share Sessions’ low tolerance for drug traffickers and his concern for the violence they inflame. But he’s wrong to cast a net wide enough to lock up nonviolent offenders for years.
Sessions’ directive mirrors the tough-on-drug-crime policies of George W. Bush’s attorney general, John Ashcroft, who in 2003 also pushed federal prosecutors to pursue mandatory minimum cases, no matter the circumstance. With Ashcroft’s policy in place, the federal prison population shot up from 172,000 to 220,000.
Mandatory minimum sentences negate a judge’s discretion, instead requiring the imposition of a set number of years behind bars for defendants convicted of particular crimes, even if they have no previous criminal record. There’s no parole for mandatory minimum inmates — they must serve at least 85 percent of their sentences.
States that have relied on treatment and rehabilitation programs over imprisonment for low-level drug crimes have seen success. One of them is Texas, which saved $2 billion by shutting down prisons no longer needed.
The federal government could save money if it adopted a similar approach. The cost of the federal prison system has reached $7 billion, while housing a population that is nearly half drug offenders.
Harsh and inflexible sentencing policies have proved counterproductive in the fight against illegal drugs. The focus should be on prosecuting the traffickers who rely on violence to grow and protect their predatory enterprise. There’s little return in filling our prisons with their customers.
— Chicago Tribune