A new tack on drug sentencing

Attorney General Eric Holder has proposed a “fundamentally new approach” to prosecuting minor drug offenders, in a bid to relieve the nation’s bloated prisons from overcrowding and financial strain. Thanks largely to mandatory minimum sentences for drug-related crimes, federal and state prisons currently hold 1.57 million people—a 500 percent increase since the late 1970s—at a cost of $80 billion a year. Under Holder’s proposal, prosecutors would refrain from mentioning the quantities of drugs involved when pressing charges in low-level cases, in order to avoid triggering harsh mandatory sentences. He also encouraged prosecutors to consider alternatives, such as drug treatment centers. “We need to ensure that incarceration is used to punish, deter, and rehabilitate,” said Holder, “not merely to convict, warehouse, and forget.”

Finally, said Neal Peirce in The Seattle Times, an attorney general ready to blow the whistle on our “ill-fated, racially tinged, and cruelly applied” justice system. Mandatory minimums were introduced during the crack epidemic of the 1980s, and black convicts are the main victims, receiving sentences on average 20 percent longer than those of their white counterparts. There are now more black men incarcerated—often for minor drug offenses—than were held in slavery in 1861.

Holder’s “a bit late to the bandwagon,” said Vikrant P. Reddy in NationalReview.com. Conservatives at both the state and national levels have been arguing for criminal justice reform for years. His proposals, in fact, mirror those enacted by Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who was able to close three prisons by promoting alternatives like drug courts and enhanced parole. It’s no accident that Texas’s crime rate is now lower than at any time since 1968.

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“For all the high-fiving and ‘it’s about time’ sentiments,” said The Miami Herald in an editorial, let’s remember that none of Holder’s initiatives are enshrined in law; they’re open to interpretation by prosecutors across the country. For real change, we need Congress to act. Given the bipartisan support for sentencing reform, “lawmakers should plunge in.”