A declaration by the Justice Department to resume seeking the harshest of penalties for alleged low-level, illegal drug offenders has drawn widespread criticism from sentencing reform advocates in higher education. They say the reversal of policy is unwarranted and unfounded based on criminal science studies of the last two decades.
“This policy just lacks imagination,” said criminologist Charles Adams, coordinator of the Criminal Justice Program at Maryland’s Bowie State University.
Returning to law-and-order, lock-them-up rhetoric and policies for low-level and first-time offenders of non-violent crimes — many of them college bound and college students — runs in the face of growing efforts to use incarceration as a last resort, to cut prison costs (Maryland spent $25,000 a year per prisoner to house and feed inmates, he said) and reduce the ranks in the nation’s overcrowded prisons.
“The administration is determined to roll back all the progress of the last eight years,” Adams said.
Adams was echoing peers across the nation responding to a brief statement last Friday by former Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, now the nation’s attorney general. The statement effectively reversed nearly a decade of efforts by the Obama administration to defuse the get-tough stance of the federal government regarding illegal drug traffic dating to the Reagan Administration and beyond.
Sessions, a law-and-order era Republican, made it clear in his brief statement that getting tough on crime was high on his agenda. In a memo establishing regarding the “charging and sentencing policy” for the Department of Justice, Sessions says, “It is a core principle that prosecutors should charge and pursue the most serious, readily provable offense. . . By definition, the most serious offenses are those that carry the most substantial guidelines sentence, including mandatory minimum sentences.”
“There’s absolutely no evidence it ever worked and will work,” said Dr. Vickie Jensen, acting chair of criminology and justice studies at California State University Northridge. Jensen has focused on criminal justice studies for 20 years and is considered an expert on women in prison issues in California. She says criminologists across the political spectrum are in agreement that harsh penalties on low-level offenders have no effect.
