PD Editorial: Attorney General Jeff Sessions heads backwards on drug policy

From homeless people on the street to home-invasion robberies, it’s easy to see human suffering and threats to public safety associated with drug abuse.

It would be naïve to expect that blanket legalization would cure all the ills associated with drugs. And it’s downright foolish to believe that locking up more people for longer terms would work any better now than it did at the height of the war of drugs.

But that isn’t stopping Jeff Sessions.

The attorney general ordered federal prosecutors to pursue the severest charges, carrying the harshest mandatory minimum sentences, even in cases involving low-level traffickers and non-violent offenders, reversing course from the Obama administration’s approach to drug enforcement.

Prosecutors ought to throw the book at violent criminals and drug kingpins, but a half-century of hard-line policies on drugs succeeded only in crowding prisons.

A smarter approach, as California Sen. Kamala Harris said this past week, would focus on prevention and treatment of drug abuse.

“I saw the war on drugs up close, and let me tell you, the war on drugs was an abject failure,” Harris said during an appearance at the Center for American Progress Ideas Conference in Washington. “It offered taxpayers a bad return on investment, it was bad for public safety, it was bad for budgets and our economy, and it was bad for people of color and those struggling to make ends meet.”

Harris started her career as a line prosecutor in Alameda County and later served as San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general, giving her plenty of perspective on the issue. She’s a blue-state Democrat, but her views on this subject echo those of some red-state Republican colleagues in the Senate.

“To be tough on crime we have to be smart on crime,” Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, tweeted in response to Sessions’ announcement. “That is why criminal justice reform is a conservative issue.”

Sessions said he was simply freeing prosecutors to enforce the law as it is written.

But that’s disingenuous.

A year ago, Congress was well on its way to passing a bipartisan criminal justice reform bill reflecting the sentiments expressed by Harris and Lee. Unfortunately, the bill got bogged down in election-year politics as candidate Donald Trump demanded a return to law-and-order and Republicans grew reticent to hand President Barack Obama a major legislative victory.

More than a $1 trillion has been spent on the war on drugs. The results include a fivefold increase in the number of people in U.S. prisons and an unmistakable disparity in the treatment of whites and minorities. Surveys show that five times as many whites use drugs as blacks, yet 58 percent of the prison population is African-American or Hispanic.

Meanwhile, the use of illegal drugs, including the growing scourge of prescription painkillers, continues unabated. There’s ample evidence that prevention and treatment are more effective - and less expensive - than long prison terms for addicts and small-time dealers. So instead of more talk of being tough on crime, wouldn’t it be better to try smart on crime?