AG is undermining smart-justice reforms

Jeff Sessions has long been a holdout on criminal justice reform, preferring the old attitude of “lock ’em up and throwaway the key.” He was harmless in the U.S. Senate, because too few of his colleagues shared his retrograde views.

But now he is the attorney general, and as the chief law enforcement officer in the land, he is aggressively pushing hard-edged policies. Recently, he urged federal prosecutors to seek the longest sentences possible. He also is itching to reopen the failed War on Drugs.

These campaigns come at inopportune time, because bipartisan momentum had been building on state and local levels to ease the high cost of incarceration by seeking alternatives for non-violent offenders. “Smart justice” has become the byword, and Republicans and Democrats have been supportive.

This is not a mere matter of liberals being soft on crime.

One of the leaders behind the “Blueprint for Reform,” a report that suggested reforms to Spokane County’s criminal justice system, was former U.S. Attorney Jim McDevitt, a Republican. U.S. Rep. Raul Labrador, R-Idaho, has authored federal sentencing reform legislation in the U.S. House.

Last June, we wrote an editorial heralding what looked to be a new era of federal reforms, after Labrador told a criminal justice reform conference, “Momentum is building for reform. This Congress alone, I’ve already met with President Obama twice. … This is actually one area that I think I can work with the president.”

But his Smarter Sentencing Act got bottled up in Congress. Nonetheless, the U.S. Sentencing Commission cut drug sentences by an average of two years, and the federal Bureau of Prisons began releasing about 6,000 prisoners to meet a goal of reducing the number of incarcerated drug offenders by half. .

“We only have 5 percent of the world’s population in the United States, and the U.S. is home to 25 percent of the world’s prison population,” Labrador said last year. “We should not be proud of that.”

Mandatory sentencing laws are a major reason. They were instituted after a dramatic increase in violent crime. Drug offenders were swept up in the fervor, with minor offenses drawing lengthy sentences.

But the violent crime rate is experiencing a long-term decline, while incarceration remains high. Mass incarceration is expensive, with each federal prisoner costing taxpayers about $30,000 a year.

Law Enforcement Leaders to Reduce Crime and Incarceration is made up of police officials and prosecutors across the country, and they have has been critical of the Trump administration’s approach. They note that high percentages of prison and jail inmates have a diagnosed mental illness or a substance abuse problem.

Locking up the right people is better than robotic sentencing. If offenders can be steered into appropriate health care and treatment settings, everyone wins.

Sessions is trying to overlay old solutions onto a new set of circumstances. The country can’t afford to turn back the clock.