Truthdig
Eric Holder's Backward Policies on Criminal Justice Echo in Jeff Sessions'
Tenure
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/eric_holders_past_is_a_model_for_jeff_se
ssions_future_20170518/
Posted on May 18, 2017
By Glen Ford / Black Agenda Report
(https://www.blackagendareport.com/sessions_holder_incarceration_revisited)
Attorney General Jeff Sessions, standing, and his predecessor, Eric
Holder. (Ryan J. Reilly
(https://www.flickr.com/photos/ryanjreilly/4180253846) / CC BY-SA 2.0
(https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/) )
Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the deep-fried racist from Alabama, would
like to turn the clock back to pre-Emancipation, but will settle for a
return to the good old days of Bill Clinton, the mega-incarcerating con man
from Hope, Arkansas. It is important to maintain an historical perspective
on the actual policies that are being pushed by Republican and Democratic
political actors, given the corporate media's practice of revising history
on a daily basis. Sessions' new instructions demand that his U.S. attorneys
"charge and pursue the most serious, readily provable offense," rather than
adjust criminal charges and sentencing recommendations based on the
defendants individual history and circumstances. Sessions insists that
federal prosecutors push all the legal buttons necessary to activate
mandatory minimum sentences, with no judicial discretion.
Sessions' policy "is not tough on crime. It is dumb on crime," said his
predecessor, Eric Holder, who executed Barack Obama's so-called "Smart on
Crime" initiative in response to a growing wave of Black protest during
Obama's second term. In typical fashion, Obama "led from behind" on criminal
justice issues, positioning himself on the cautious side of the emerging
establishment consensus that the U.S. prison population must be shrunk.
Thus, the Obama administration gave ample lip service to rolling back
patently racist crack cocaine penalties, but, once legislation to that
effect was passed, fought successfully in the courts to prevent early
release of inmates convicted under the law. Instead, prisoners were forced
to undergo individual review. The lucky ones, who fit Eric Holder's strict
release eligibility guidelines, were dribbled out of prison as public
relations exhibits of Obama's kindness.
Obama and Holder did tolerate, and even encourage, a degree of prosecutorial
discretion in framing charges and recommending sentences-although they
proposed no fundamental reforms to the system. The truth is, prosecutorial
discretion is an arbitrary tool of the state, a matter of convenience and
budget-adjusting that has nothing to do with justice and leaves the
repressive architecture of mass Black incarceration totally intact-as should
be obvious, since all it took was a memo from Jeff Sessions to undo the
phony "reform."
What Sessions is actually defending are the racist policies championed by
Eric Holder, himself, when he was U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia
in the mid-Nineties. Sessions needs only to drive his time machine back two
decades to be in total synch with the Eric Holder who made his political
bones by imposing systemic racial profiling on the streets of Black
Washington, D.C. Holder kicked off his "Operation Ceasefire" campaign on Dr.
Martin Luther King's birthday, 1995, framing his anti-crime strategy in
civil rights terms-the right of Black people to be safe. On his watch,
Driving While Young and Black became sufficient cause for a police stop and
search-and all the consequences that follow. "The people who will be stopped
will be young Black males, overwhelmingly," Holder conceded. However, the
greater good must be served. Young Black males make up 1 percent of the
national population but account for 18 percent of the nation's homicides,"
he said.
Holder's policy of targeting "suspicious" vehicles for stops "with the aim
of conducting searches" is detailed in James Forman Jr.'s new book, "Locking
Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America," an indispensable
resource for understanding the roots of modern mass incarceration and the
role the Black political (misleadership) class played in creating the
monster. The man who would later declare that some banks are too big to
prosecute (how's that for discretion?) helped establish a national precedent
for stripping constitutional protections from the "suspicious" demographics
of society. James Forman reports that Holder's signature "pretext stops" are
responsible for "most of the racial disparity in traffic stops, nationwide."
Thus, Eric Holder has contributed mightily to the misery endured by,
literally, millions in the U.S. prison gulag over the last several decades,
while his feeble discretionary criminal justice "reforms" under Obama have
no lasting institutional impact.
Worse, Eric Holder's past is a model for Attorney General Jeff Session's
future.
Black Agenda Report executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at
Glen.Ford@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.
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