In spite of Jeff Sessions, criminal justice reform still moving forward

http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/opinion/editorials/sd-jeff-sessions-criminal-justice-reform-20171005-story.html

The San Diego Union-Tribune Editorial Board

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When it comes to criminal justice, Attorney General Jeff Sessions is an unreconstructed throwback to the tough-on-crime days of American politics in the 1980s and 1990s. He has ordered Justice Department prosecutors to seek the toughest possible penalties against criminal defendants; he has called federal consent decrees that seek to stop systemic police mistreatment of minorities a “dangerous” overreach; and he has contemplated a crackdown on states that legalize marijuana use.

Thursday, he revived a program to file federal charges against suspects in street-level gun and gang crimes — a practice that’s been criticized for deputizing federal agents to be “super-local police.”

Whatever drives Sessions’ zeal for an extremely punitive criminal-justice system, it’s not evidence that it works or is cost-effective. No other industrial democracy has sentencing practices as harsh as America’s. Yet according to the Numbeo database of global crime statistics, as of mid-2017, virtually every other industrial democracy has crime rates that are somewhat lower (France, Australia, Great Britain) to much lower (Canada, Germany, Spain) — and all spend much less per capita on prisons.

The encouraging news for Americans who want rational crime policies that don’t waste money or discard redeemable lives is that bipartisan groups of lawmakers at the federal and state level agree.


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