After months in the making, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has taken the first swing at cannabis. His attack comes in the form of changing the policy set out by former Attorney General Eric Holder. Known as the Holder Memo, the 2013 directive asked federal prosecutors to avoid charging defendants with crimes that trigger mandatory minimums. It has also been the main legal protection states have relied upon when installing recreational marijuana laws.
Sessions has officially directed federal prosecutors to charge defendants with the most serious provable crimes possible. Specifically, crimes which carry minimum sentences and the harshest penalties. He even wants prosecutors to pursue punishments as far above minimum as is deemed physically possible.
He has directed federal prosecutors to use whatever means necessary to achieve his goals through his recent directive. With it, he has revealed the bloody legacy he intends to leave. He has decided to make his stand on the bloody and chained backs of mothers, fathers, the terminally ill and mentally unstable.
Sessions doesn’t want to reserve the harshest penalties for defendants with known gang, violence or large-scale trafficking histories. He wants to instill terror in the population. And the only tools at his disposal is the entire federal judicial system.
Is the water really that hot?
Sessions laid out his plan in a two-page memo and sent it to more than 5,000 assistant U.S. attorneys. In the document, Sessions orders prosecutors to “charge and pursue the most serious, readily provable offense”. That is as clear a declaration of was as there ever was and marks the first significant criminal justice effort by the Trump regime.
In language that reflects a deluded and willfully malicious view of humanity, The attorney general’s memo claims that “By definition, the most serious offenses are those that carry the most substantial guidelines sentence, including mandatory minimum sentences.”
This move is likely to repeat the mistakes of the War on Drugs which has had a catastrophic impact on poor and minority communities. But Sessions is determined to leverage every last vestige of power to achieve his goals, even if that means blood in the streets and putting federal inmates into private prisons.
One Sessions to rule them all, and in the darkness bind them.
Although Sessions sees private prisons as another tool to increase incarceration rates. Sessions claimed earlier this year that decreasing the number of private prisons had “impaired the [Bureau of Prisons’] ability to meet the future needs of the federal correctional system”.
When confronted with a declining murder rate and decreased recidivism due to mental health treatments, Sessions claims that only more aggressive tactics can prevent a new violent epidemic. Instead of more mental health treatment and less punishment, Jeff Sessions feels that locking people in cages is the best way to treat his fellow Americans in 2017 and beyond.
