In a harsh reversal from the Eric Holder-led Justice Department, civil liberties advocates, science and logic, Jeff Sessions has directed federal prosecutors across the country to charge drug suspects with the most serious charges legally possible.
Sessions, the love child of the Travelocity traveling gnome and the yellow Teletubby, issued a two-page memo that outlined his draconian tactics, according to CNN. The new guidelines state that “prosecutors should charge and pursue the most serious, readily provable offense,” later defining such offenses as “those that carry the most substantial ... sentence, including mandatory minimum sentences.”
Before issuing the directive, Sessions informed federal prison officials that they should expect the rates of incarceration to rise, although the Justice Department did not elaborate on whether Sessions made the phone call while wearing his Klansman’s hood or if he simply turned it to the side and listened through the eyeholes.
The policy is an about-face from the Obama-era Justice Department led by Holder. To avoid triggering mandatory minimums, Holder explicitly forbade prosecutors from reporting the quantity of drugs involved in cases with nonviolent offenders not affiliated with gangs or drug cartels. The Obama administration sought to reduce the federal prison population by ending the decadeslong war on drugs.
A 2012 study by the University of Michigan Law School found that prosecutors were twice as likely to file charges carrying mandatory minimums against blacks (pdf) as they were against whites. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (pdf) and the United States Sentencing Commission (pdf), blacks and whites use drugs at about the same rates, but blacks are six times more likely to do prison time for illegal drug use.
Also, every scientific study ever done shows that incarceration rates have no correlation with lowering drug use, but like most Republicans, the gargoyle DNA embedded in Sessions’ blood probably won’t allow his troglodyte brain to consider scientific fact.
I guess this means that Snoop Dogg probably shouldn’t apply for that new opening as director of the FBI.
Read more at CNN.