Attorney General’s New Prison Reform Gives Hope To Elderly, Non-Violent, & Low-Level Drug Offenders Ms. Bels Wednesday, August 14, 2013 Credits & Debits, The Receipt A ttorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. may soon grant a bit of hope to prisoners serving long-term mandatory sentences. During the American Bar Association conference, in San Francisco, the Attorney General announced plans for a prison reform package. As part of the new Justice Department policy, offenders currently serving (and any detained in the future) will no longer serve severe mandatory sentences. Those offenders who are subject to this new policy will include elderly, non-violent inmates, and small-time drug dealers with no gang or large-scale drug affiliations. Over the years, Holder Jr and the Justice Department have seem the overwhelming increase of the prison population. The issue arose when the prison system was opened up to private entities. These private entities soon began to build massive compounds across the U.S.. Some theorists believe that the prisons were built (post the drug wars of the 1980’s) as another way to systematically oppress minorities. Also, private prisons costs millions to operate. Therefore, the only way to maintain the facility is to keep prisoners in for long periods of time and continue to fill it up with new inmates. But, the system is broken and has strayed far away from it’s original purpose: to reprimand and rehabilitate. “We must face the reality that, as it stands, our system is, in too many ways, broken,” Holder said. “And with an outsized, unnecessarily large prison population, we need to ensure that incarceration is used to punish, to deter and to rehabilitate — not merely to warehouse and to forget.” “A vicious cycle of poverty, criminality and incarceration traps too many Americans and weakens too many communities,” Holder said Monday. (Excerpts of his prepared remarks were provided Sunday to The Washington Post.) He added that “many aspects of our criminal justice system may actually exacerbate these problems rather than alleviate them.” Holder believes that if reform occurs, our communities will be strengthened. Therefore, he asked over 90 U.S. attorneys to come up with ways in which federal charges should be avoided and when not. He also charged the Justice Department and Department of Education with figuring out the disconnect with the “from school-to-prison” pipeline and see why so many kids end up behind bars (instead of being punished in schools). The attorney general can make some changes to drug policy on his own. He is giving new instructions to federal prosecutors on how they should write their criminal complaints when charging low-level drug offenders, to avoid triggering the mandatory minimum sentences. Under certain statutes, inflexible sentences for drug crimes are mandated regardless of the facts or conduct in the case, reducing the discretion of prosecutors, judges and juries. Some of Holder’s other initiatives will require legislative change. Holder is urging passage of legislation with bipartisan support that is aimed at giving federal judges more discretion in applying mandatory minimum sentences to certain drug offenses. Read more here… What do you think? Is prison reform needed?
