Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced Monday that low-level, nonviolent drug offenders with no ties to gangs or large-scale drug organizations will no longer be charged with offenses that impose severe mandatory sentences.Mandatory minimum sentencing has been a problem for a very long time now and we do put too many people in prison. It's never made much sense to turn low-level drug offenders into felons. This has been a bipartisan problem for much of my adult life and it's a good time to revisit the issue.
The new Justice Department policy is part of a comprehensive prison reform package that Holder unveiled in a speech to the American Bar Association in San Francisco. He also introduced a policy to reduce sentences for elderly, nonviolent inmates and find alternatives to prison for nonviolent criminals.
Better still is this idea:
He also said the Justice Department would work with the Department of Education and other allies “to confront the ‘school-to-prison pipeline’ and those zero-tolerance school discipline policies that do not promote safety,” but instead serve as gateways to the criminal justice system.We've all heard the ridiculous stories where zero tolerance policies have turned unwitting kids into subjects for severely punitive measures; this link provides a handy compendium. It's ridiculous to suspend a 9-year old boy for sexual harassment because he calls a teacher "cute," to use just one example from what is a very long list.
“A minor school disciplinary offense should put a student in the principal’s office and not a police precinct,” Holder said.
We have a serious problem concerning respect for the law in this country, but it's hardly surprising if laws are arbitrary, selectively enforced, and punitive. Holder has a lot to answer for in his own career, but the steps he announced yesterday are a good move.
4 comments:
It's a good start.
But do they have the authority do to this? Seems like this President in particular has a strong case of "L'etat, c'est moi" that anyone who loves limited government, liberal or conservative, ought to reject. Legislative authority is given to the legislature, not the President.
Fair challenge, Bubba. They won’t have any authority over state law, but prosecutors have discretion in how they charge cases and Holder can direct federal prosecutors to look at whatever options exist for avoiding mandatory minimum sentences.
I too worry about the l’etat c’est moi stance of this administration, but this seems to run counter to the usual stance this administration (and others before it, to be fair) has taken, which is to aggregate more power to itself.
The underlying laws need to be addressed as well, at all levels. We got a pretty good example of how prosecutors can run roughshod at the state level in the Zimmerman trial.
The trick here is that the mandatory sentencing laws were passed to prevent exactly this kind of thing. They were passed, if I remember correctly, in the 1980s as a response to abuse of prosecutorial and judicial discretion that was rampant in the 1970s. (how quickly we forget the horrific murder/crime rates that time period due to insanity like this)
In this case, I also tend to agree with Holder's motives, but the guy did actually make an oath to uphold the Constitution and the law, and he's clearly breaking that oath.
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