Attorney General Eric Holder Wants Sentencing Reform

We at Weedist have covered a great deal about US Attorney General Eric Holder, and I must admit I was quite surprised when I saw that he was actually talking about something sensible and decent. Holder announced his support for reducing sentences for non-violent offenders, saying “I think there are too many people in jail for too long, and for not necessarily good reasons.”

The war on drugs is now 30, 40 years old. There have been a lot of unintended consequences. There’s been a decimation of certain communities, in particular communities of color.

[W]e can certainly change our enforcement priorities, and so we have some control in that way. How we deploy our agents, what we tell our prosecutors to charge, but I think this would be best done if the executive branch and the legislative branch work together to look at this whole issue and come up with changes that are acceptable to both.

The Department of Justice has been quietly working on several proposals to reduce or discard mandatory minimum sentences. One such proposal, the Smarter Sentencing Act of 2013, would allow judges to hand down sentences lower than the mandatory minimum, as well as reducing this minimum for several charges. Another similar proposal, the Justice Safety Valve Act of 2013, would also give judges more power to decide to hand down lower sentences.

The entire justice system may be getting more sensible, it seems, focusing their resources on programs for prisoners to successfully return to society and denying the use of those resources on too-severe penalties for non-violent offenders. Perhaps we will even have a system someday where the Department of Corrections is actually a fitting name, rather than the current situation where the department would be more aptly named “the Department of Wasteful Punishment and More Needless Suffering.” Then again, we may not. As with most things, we will have to wait and see how it works out. After all, lots of people used to think that handing pot-smokers several-year-sentences for a couple joints would keep people from smoking marijuana. That certainly didn’t work the way they thought it would.