Attorney General Jeff Sessions – And his “War on Thugs”
Jeff Sessions Can’t Back up His Mandatory Sentencing Claims
The Trump administration’s tough on crime agenda is about as useful as decaf coffee.
It has no use other than in the garbage.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions latest reason to be tough on crime was to creatively without any proof, reference a memo by the Obama Administration that had suggested that federal prosecutors avoid charges for low-level drug offenders that could trigger lengthy mandatory minimums.
Sessions clearly not understanding how crime rates work, quite disagrees with that memo. His rather dull, unproven and completely inaccurate argument is that the memo actually caused violent crime to spike for the first time in decades and he incorrectly suggested that his decision to revoke the memo will, in turn, cause violent crime to fall, with absolutely zero proof what so ever that the memo did in fact cause crime to spike.
Which it didn’t by the way.
Throughout the history of crime it has never once been proven that mandatory sentencing has ever brought crime numbers down.
Ever.
What we do tend to see when we study crime rates are things like poverty, drugs, gangs and alcohol tend to help increase crime levels along with as you might have guessed, a growing population.
To break that down into layman’s terms for someone like Jeff Sessions who so very clearly has no grasp on crime in our nation, our population overall is growing and any time you have a growing population you will see an increase in crime rates because, well, as one might also guess crime rates grow as the population grows.
So the demand is bigger, poverty is a bigger problem, drug use becomes a bigger problem, gangs become a bigger problem and so on and so forth.
To take that a step even further, it’s not always really an increase in crime if you are looking at just numbers, although it may appear that way because of the of the way crime stats are reported, one has to compare those numbers with the numbers of the population which very few of us actually do, especially the mainstream media.
The point is simple, crime rates usually tend to keep up with the growth of the population that supports it. So the numbers in relation to its population really have not increased overall, despite what they were the year before, or year before that, etc. It’s not like the population is shrinking here.
More often than not, mandatory sentencing can do more harm than good because mandatory sentencing tends to create blanket sentencing. The one crime, one sentence for all type of thing.
The sad fact is that we currently live in a society where blanket sentencing is no longer an appropriate nor effective way of dealing with crime at any level.
I once had two shoplifting cases before me, from the same store. But the crime because the individuals were two completely different people, was in fact different.
Here’s why:
In one case, the defendant shoplifted frivolously meaning that individual stole, makeup, hair product, nail polish, etc. This particular individual had a rather good education and upbringing. This individual also did not care about being charged with shoplifting and was not aiming to change any time soon.
Defendant #2, this individual shoplifted food, generic food, things like cheap hamburger, rice, beans, baby formula, a couple of bags of oranges and baby diapers. She had an 8th grade education, had married an immigrant who had been deported and was left overnight with no income, no job and no way to support her family.
While both were in the wrong, they should not have been sentenced the same way. Our society is starting to see the clear difference in crimes that are committed and by whom. While we do not condone the crimes we need to understand why they were committed so that others will not resort to the same thing.
We set up a judicial system to reform and to teach others a lesson about not following in the footsteps of those before, yet we do very little to ensure that other than to jail and hand down mandatory sentencing.
We can’t keep enforcing mandatory sentencing as a way to control crime, you control crime by becoming educated yourself as to why it is happening in the first place.
This is where you learn how to head it off before it happens again.
But I am not the Attorney General, who should already know this and be somewhat more forward thinking. It is 2017 after all.
Besides, throughout the entire history of crime and putting laws on the books in an effort to prevent crime has that done anything other than instill the very idea of committing said crime into someone’s head in new and creative ways? Think about it.
Cristal M Clark
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