A bipartisan sentencing reform package is a threat to minorities who could be on “the receiving end” of violence caused by inmates who might obtain an early release under the terms of the legislation, according to law-and-order Republicans and their law enforcement allies.
“My best judgment after many, many years in law enforcement is that bottom on crime rates has been reached and the rise we’re beginning to see is part of a long-term trend, not an aberration, and the last thing we need to do is a major reduction in penalties,” Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., told reporters Wednesday.
The Alabama Republican is trying to thwart Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn and Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, who recently concluded a round of negotiations with Democratic counterparts and Republican colleagues en route to announcing that four more GOP senators had co-sponsored the legislation. Sessions convened a number of law enforcement officials who oppose a rollback of mandatory minimum sentencing, to argue that the legislation would cause an increase in violent crime and would harm minorities.
“When that social engineering experiment goes bad, you know who is on the receiving end of that more so than anybody else?” said Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, who was appointed to his post by a Democratic governor but became a hero on the Right due to his praise for the Second Amendment. “My people: Black people. Brown people. Young people.”
Lee, a Tea Party senator who serves on the Judiciary Committee, predicted such attacks when he and his allies released a revised version of the bill two weeks ago. He observed that federal spending on prisons has soared in the wake of the tough-on-crime movement, diverting resources from actual law enforcement. “We currently spend about 25 percent of the Department of Justice’s budget on the Bureau of Prisons,” he said. “This is roughly on par with what we spend on both the FBI and the DEA combined.”
A group of conservative activists who favor the legislation echoed that point in a response to the Sessions press conference. “Any conservative who believes in curbing the size of government, cutting wasteful spending, restoring families and encouraging personal responsibility should support those principles,” Freedomworks president Adam Brandon, Grover Norquist of the Americans for Tax Reform, and other criminal justice reform activists said in a joint statement released by the U.S. Justice Action Network.
But the issue has divided Senate Republicans and “energized” some lawmakers who otherwise have a reputation for relative docility, according to a senior GOP aide. When the subject was broached at a recent conference meeting, the conversation featured table-pounding denunciations of any such reform.
Sessions’ press conference was hardly less vehement. “This legislation is an irresponsible catastrophe,” said John Walters, who headed the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy under George W. Bush. “People in federal prison are not there because they’re low-level offenders, they’re not principally there because they have an addiction problem. They’re there because they’re narco-traffickers, because they’re greedy, because they’re part of a violent conspiracy.”
That’s a shot at Lee’s chief argument supporting the legislation, which he believes would prevent low-level drug dealers from facing onerous sentences. At the rollout of the revised bill, he reminded reporters of the case of Weldon Angelos, who was sentenced to 55 years in prison because he sold marijuana three times while in possession of a firearm.
“I have yet to meet a single person, male or female, Democrat or Republican, old or young, who thinks that sentence was correct,” Lee said, adding that the judge who imposed the sentence believed it was a mistake.
But the sentencing-reform opponents argued that so-called “low-level drug dealers” should be regarded by federal policy-makers as dangerous, violent criminals. “If some guy or woman was selling low amounts of heroin to your child, would you look at that person as a low-level drug dealer?” Clarke said. “I wouldn’t.”
