Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Thursday criminal justice reformers should focus on stopping crime instead of making reforms to the sentencing process.
“I’m afraid we don’t have a sentencing problem, we have a crime problem. If we want to bring down our prison population then we should bring down crime,” Sessions told a group of sheriffs in Oklahoma.
The remarks come on the heels of a letter written by law enforcement leaders urging him and President Trump to get on board with bipartisan criminal justice reform.
Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., reintroduced a bipartisan criminal justice reform bill earlier this month that failed to make it to the Senate floor last year that calls for lower mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenders, addresses high recidivism rates nationwide and calls for the creation of a National Criminal Justice Commission to review the nation’s justice system.
However Sessions — who voted against the bill last year when he was a senator — made it clear that the “national surge in violent crime and record number of drug deaths over the last two years” does not mean sentences need to be lighter.
“We have to be careful. We just have to be careful,” he said, adding, “Federal prison population is down 15 percent – the average sentence is down 19 percent. Crime is up.”
Sessions told those gathered the Justice Department will continue to stand with them.
“We have your back. We understand one thing, criminals are the problem, law officers are the solution,” he emphatically said.
The remarks echo Sessions’ May memo on sentencing, where he directed prosecutors to “charge and pursue the most serious, readily provable offense.”
“This policy affirms our responsibility to enforce the law, is moral and just, and produces consistency,” Sessions wrote in the memo. “This policy fully utilizes the tools Congress has given us. By definition, the most serious offenses are those that carry the most substantial guidelines sentence, including mandatory minimum sentences.”
Sessions reiterated Thursday the Justice Department will stand by the May memo.
