A new federal report throws water on a claim by Attorney General Jeff Sessions that “softened” drug sentencing policies led to a jump in crime.
The Department of Justice’s Office of Inspector General report reviewed former Attorney General Eric Holder’s 2013 “Smart on Crime” initiative, which allowed federal prosecutors to use their discretion in handing out mandatory minimums sentences for drug offenders.
The inspector general reported Holder’s “Smart on Crime” initiative was not evenly applied nationwide and data on charging decisions was not fully collected by the Justice Department.
“As a result, we determined that national trends should not be interpreted in such a way as to conclude that Smart on Crime had a uniform impact across all the nation’s districts,” the report said.
The report stands in contrast to a recent claim by Sessions that lenient sentences have led to a recent uptick in violent crime nationwide.
Sessions penned an op-ed for the Washington Post on Sunday defending his sentencing memo by linking more lenient sentences to more crime nationwide.
He wrote: “Before that policy change [by Holder in 2013], the violent crime rate in the United States had fallen steadily for two decades, reaching half of what it was in 1991. Within one year after the Justice Department softened its approach to drug offenders, the trend of decreasing violent crime reversed. In 2015, the United States suffered the largest single-year increase in the overall violent crime rate since 1991.”
The murder rate rose 10.8 percent across the U.S. 2015, the FBI said, part of a nearly 4 percent increase in violent crime. When that data was released in September 2016, the Justice Department noted that 2015 was still a very safe year.
“It is important to remember that while crime did increase over all last year, 2015 still represented the third-lowest year for violent crime in the past two decades,” then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch said.
In 2016, preliminary data shows the largest U.S. cities have led to an increase in crime. The Brennan Center of Justice at New York University School of Law has cautioned against using the crime jump in those cities as representative of a nationwide jump.
“Since 2014, some cities have seen increases in murder, causing increases in national rates of murder and violence. These spikes in urban violence are a serious cause for concern,” the Brennan Center’s said. “But history shows these trends do not necessarily signal the start of a new nationwide crime wave, and even with these increases, crime and murder rates remain near historic lows. There is no evidence of a national crime wave.”
In 2015, the overall crime rate fell for the 14th year in a row, says the Brennan Center, and preliminary data shows that in 2016 it will rise less than 1 percent.
In May, Sessions announced a new federal sentencing policy for drug offenders, effectively rolling back Holder’s memo and instructing all 94 United States attorneys’ offices to bring the most “serious, readily approvable offense” charge in all cases going forward.
The inspector general’s report also called into question if Holder’s policy was effective at producing the intended impact, which was to put fewer people into prison for drug crimes.
The report showed there were decreases in the number of mandatory minimums handed out, specifically in the Southwest, following Holder’s memo. The report concluded the rate of federal drug offenders who did not receive a mandatory minimum sentence rose from 40 percent in 2012 to 54 percent in 2015.
Paul Hofer, a policy analyst at Federal Public and Community Defenders, has estimated just 530 defendants “would likely have received a lower sentence if the Holder memo had been in effect in FY 2012” – possibly meaning Holder’s memo didn’t work as intended.
