Reality is finally catching up to the decades of grandstanding politicians constantly ratcheting up criminal penalties leaving our expanded prison system an overcrowded long term warehouses for for the burgeoning prison population. Eric Holder is taking a long overdue step to start reversing that trend for many non-violent drug crimes in a speech he will be making tonight.
'Mandatory minimum' sentences to end for many drug offenders
Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. plans to announce a federal policy shift to reduce penalties for low-level, nonviolent offenders and to ease prison overcrowding.
By David G. Savage
"Too many Americans go to too many prisons for far too long, and for no good law enforcement reason," Holder planned to tell the American Bar Assn. meeting here, according to an advance text of his remarks. "While the aggressive enforcement of federal criminal statutes remains necessary, we cannot simply prosecute or incarcerate our way to becoming a safer nation."
Under the new policy, prosecutors would send fewer drug offenders to federal prison for long terms and send more of them to drug treatment and community service. A Justice Department spokesman said officials had no estimate of how many future prosecutions would be affected.
In his speech, Holder endorses that point of view, saying that "a vicious cycle of poverty, criminality and incarceration traps too many Americans and weakens too many communities" and that "many aspects of our criminal justice system may actually exacerbate this problem, rather than alleviate it."
He also notes that prominent conservatives have embraced the idea of cutting sentences and reducing prison populations.
"While the entire U.S. [prison] population has increased by about a third since 1980, the federal population has grown at an astonishing rate — by almost 800%," Holder's speech says. "It's still growing, despite the fact that federal prisons are operating at nearly 40% above capacity. Even though this country comprises just 5% of the world's population, we incarcerate almost a quarter of the world's prisoners."
The article points out that congress has been slower to undo laws mandating excessive sentences than many state legislatures have.
This excerpt comes from a diary I published three weeks ago about our alarming incarceration rate in this country:
'Incarceration Nation' Michelle Alexander's powerful indictment of the Drug War as the new Jim Crow
Incarceration Nation
Santa Fe, New Mexico 12 September 2012
So what explains this sudden explosion in incarceration, black incarceration, if not crime or crime rates? There was a drastic shift in attitudes. There was a wave of punitiveness that washed over the United States. We declared a war on drugs, and a get-tough movement was born on the heels of the civil rights movement. The war on drugs and the get-tough movement are responsible for the quintupling of our prison population in a few short decades. What has changed dramatically is not crime but what counts as crime and how we respond to it. And nothing has contributed more to the emergence of this new caste system than the war on drugs. Drug convictions alone, just drug convictions, accounted for about two thirds of the increase in the Federal prison system and more than half of the increase in the state system between 1985 and 2000, the period of our prison system’s most dramatic expansion. Drug convictions have increased more than 1000% since the drug war began.
To get a sense of how large a contribution the drug war has made to mass incarceration, consider this. There are more people in prisons and jails today just for drug offenses than were incarcerated for all reasons in 1980. Most Americans violate drug laws in their lifetime. Most do. That’s a fact. But the drug war, not by accident, has been waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color, even though studies have consistently shown now for decades that, contrary to popular belief, people of color are not any more likely to use or sell illegal drugs than whites. That defies our basic racial stereotypes about who a drug dealer is.