Former Attorney General Eric Holder blasted a new Justice Department policy on prosecutions and sentencing, calling it “dumb on crime.”
“The policy announced today is not tough on crime. It is dumb on crime. It is an ideologically motivated, cookie-cutter approach that has only been proven to generate unfairly long sentences that are often applied indiscriminately and do little to achieve long-term public safety,” Holder said in a statement Friday shortly after the new department memo.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions released a memo early Friday directing prosecutors to “charge and pursue the most serious, readily provable offense” in all cases going forward.
The Sessions memo reverses one issued by Holder in 2013 that encouraged federal prosecutors to seek the most harsh punishment for only “serious, high-level, or violent drug traffickers” instead of lower-level offenders.
Holder cited department data showing that since the implementation of his memo — the Smart on Crime directive — prosecutors have been able to successfully focus more resources on higher level drug offenders such as kingpins and cartel leaders.
“The data showed that while they brought fewer indictments carrying a mandatory minimum sentence, the prosecutions of high-level drug defendants had risen and that cooperation and plea rates remained effectively the same,” Holder said. “These reversals will be both substantively and financially ruinous, setting the Department back on track to again spending one-third of its budget on incarcerating people, rather than preventing, detecting, or investigating crime.”
