NEWS ANALYSIS
WASHINGTON (CN) - With federal prison populations having hit their lowest level in a decade under President Barack Obama, criminal-justice experts are grappling with the new administration’s push for tougher sentences.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions signaled a shift earlier this month in a memorandum that directs federal prosecutors to always charge the "most serious readily provable offense."
Though the announcement prompted alarm among reform-minded advocates, it was hardly out-of-character for Sessions. Prior to taking on his new role at the Department of Justice, Sessions had been one of the few holdouts on a bipartisan sentencing-reform bill that would have reduced mandatory-minimum sentences for nonviolent offenders. The bill died in the Senate last Congress.
Discussing the directive in an interview, a former colleague of Sessions found the attorney general’s objective hard to pin down.
"I want to know exactly what he means in real-life practical terms because my understanding is that prosecutors will retain discretion as they do now," Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said. "And I understand that he wants to seek longer terms. In some instances that effort has proved futile and counterproductive, but I don't know what the specifics are."
Though the attorney general has said that the new policy is geared at making charging policies consistent, reform-minded advocates say it will result in people spending longer in prison without a demonstrable effect on crime.
"It's good that justice in Alabama looks the same as justice in California,” Ames Grawert, counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, said in an interview. “But if the way you achieve that uniformity is taking power out of the hands of judges and taking power out of the hands of prosecutors — who might have very well-informed opinions about how to fit the punishment to the crime — you might get that uniformity but at the expense of justice.”
Among the groups that have supported the Sessions memo are the National Association of United States Attorneys and the National Sheriff's Association.
Lawrence Leiser, president of the federal prosecutors’ group, said the policy does nothing more than respect the mandatory sentence lengths Congress has laid out for federal crimes.
"What Congress decided to do is that there are certain kinds of criminal offenses, serious, significant criminal offenses, which they feel should be consistently enforced throughout the country and not left up to the discretion of individual judges," Leiser said in an interview.
[blockquote author="Ames Grawert, counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice" style="1"]You might get that uniformity but at the expense of justice.”[/blockquote]
The Brennan Center’s Grawert meanwhile questioned what meaningful effect on equality is achieved by making people spend more time in prison than their crime deserves.