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US Attorney General Jeff Sessions has traveled around the country this year invoking fears of violent crime — and particularly the criminal group MS-13 — to justify a new “tough on crime” crackdown under the Trump administration.
On the ground, however, Sessions’s anti-crime efforts look more like the old war on drugs than a new push against violent crime. Earl Rinehart reported for the Columbus Dispatch that US Attorney for the Southern District of Ohio Benjamin Glassman “is costing taxpayers more money” by prosecuting more people, even minor players in drug trafficking, “and he’s OK with that.” Rinehart went on (emphasis mine):
The increase in the prosecution of violent crimes and drug cases such as these, especially amid the opioid crisis, had the U.S District Court for Southern Ohio looking for extra jail space to keep a record 483 defendants whose cases were pending as of Oct. 7.
“That’s a lot for us,” said Chief U.S. District Judge Edmund A. Sargus Jr. Of the total defendants, 223 were up on drug charges, 43 for violent crimes and 38 for child pornography.
Based on these figures, nearly half of the new cases are for drug charges, and less than 10 percent are for violent crime. Despite Sessions’s rhetoric about violent crime, it sure looks like drugs are still his office’s main focus.
On Twitter, Glassman pushed back on the Dispatch’s report. He wrote, “I disagree that we are now charging minor players who, in years past, would not have been charged at all. To the contrary, as the article also notes, we're pushing our investigations and prosecutions farther and wider than ever before. If anything, as our scope and reach continue to grow, defendants who looked like leaders in years past now seem more like minor players. But we are absolutely not looking to prosecute low-level folks. Just the opposite.”
In a statement, Glassman also questioned the Dispatch’s methodology and sources. He said that, by his count, “roughly a third of our case load involves violent crime and another third involves drugs or organized crime related to drugs, like money laundering.”
Still, the federal government is unique in that about half the people it locks up are in for drug offenses. At the state level, where nearly nine in 10 prisoners in the US are held, most are in prison for violent offenses.
Sessions seems determined to continue that federal trend. One of his first moves in the Justice Department was to instruct federal prosecutors to bring punitive charges that can trigger harsh mandatory minimum prison sentences against even low-level drug offenders, rescinding an Obama administration memo that told federal officials to pull back on these kinds of prosecutions.
Criticizing the Obama administration’s decision, Sessions previously said, “What was the result? It was exactly what you would think: sentences went down and crime went up. Sentences for federal drug crimes dropped by 18 percent from 2009 to 2016. Violent crime — which had been decreasing for two decades — suddenly went up again.”
The research is against Sessions’s claims
There is no reason, based on the research, to think the two trends Sessions cited are linked. Studies have repeatedly found that harsher punishments — which mandatory minimums force on judges by requiring that they sentence offenders to a minimum amount of time in prison — and the higher incarceration rates they lead to don’t have a big impact on crime.
A 2015 review of the research by the Brennan Center for Justice estimated that more incarceration explained zero to 7 percent of the crime drop since the 1990s, while other researchers estimate it drove 10 to 25 percent of the crime drop since the ’90s — not a big impact either way. A 2014 analysis by the Pew Charitable Trusts also found that states that reduced their imprisonment rates also saw some of the biggest drops in crime, suggesting that there isn’t a hard link between incarceration and crime.
As Harvard criminologist Thomas Abt previously told me, “Jeff Sessions is a crime dinosaur, peddling ‘tough on crime’ policies that went extinct years ago. He tries to link violent crime to the ‘smart on crime’ policies of the past administration, but there’s simply no evidence to support his argument.” (Abt broke down his criticisms further in a series of tweets.)
In fact, Sessions’s prosecution strategy likely won’t make an impact even in combating the spread and use of drugs.
One of the best studies on this is a 2014 review of the research by Peter Reuter at the University of Maryland and Harold Pollack at the University of Chicago. They found that while simply prohibiting drugs to some extent does raise their prices, there’s no good evidence that tougher punishments or harsher supply-elimination efforts do a better job of driving down access to drugs and substance misuse than lighter penalties. So increasing the severity of the punishment doesn’t do much, if anything, to slow the flow of drugs.
“We did the experiment. In 1980, we had about 15,000 people behind bars for drug dealing. And now we have about 450,000 people behind bars for drug dealing,” Mark Kleiman, a drug policy expert at the Marron Institute at New York University, previously told me. “And the prices of all major drugs are down dramatically. So if the question is do longer sentences lead to a higher drug price and therefore less drug consumption, the answer is no.”
Update: Added a statement from US Attorney for the Southern District of Ohio Benjamin Glassman.
