‘Mr. Sessions, our lives, our families, and our pain will not serve as a prop in this farce’

In the months since his appointment, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has embraced disproven crime-fighting tools that were part and parcel of this country’s failed war on drugs. He tries to justify his approach by referring to a “surge in violent crime” and claiming to be interested in protecting our communities.

On June 20, at a national summit on violent crime from which civil rights advocates were excluded, Sessions named urban crime as a motivating factor for Department of Justice new priorities. On Tuesday, Sessions explicitly cited the needs of minority communities as a justification for his policy changes. Sessions has claimed that the Obama Justice Department’s policies resulted in a surge of violent crime. However, there is no evidence that federal charging decisions had anything to do with crime rates, which rose slightly in 2015 but remain at historic lows.

With more than 2.3 million people in correctional facilities, the United States leads the world in imprisonment. More than half of those incarcerated are parents of children under the age of 18. Incarceration ratcheted up during the tough-on-crime era that began in the ’70s when new laws and aggressive prosecution resulted in long sentences set by law that even a judge could not lower.

The burden of America’s 40-year experiment in mass incarceration has not been shared equally. African Americans are incarcerated at more than five times the rate of whites in state prisons. And while African Americans make up about 12 percent of the U.S. population, 38 percent of federal inmates are black.

This disparity cannot be justified by a claim that African Americans commit more crimes. For example, African Americans report a similar rate of drug use (10.5 percent) to those of whites (9.5 percent). But the imprisonment rate of African Americans for drug charges is almost six times that of whites.

In the federal prison system, 49 percent of prisoners have drug convictions compared with 16 percent in state prisons. The stark racial disparities resulting from sentencing differences for crack and powder cocaine convictions have resulted in unnecessarily long sentences for thousands of federal prisoners. Obama administration reforms of federal mandatory minimum sentencing laws for nonviolent drug convictions have addressed, but not completely erased, this crackpowder sentencing disparity.

What the evidence does show is this: Those reforms decreased the federal prison population by 15 percent, from 219,298 in 2013 to 187,373 this month. Sessions is attempting to reverse this trend.

The outcome will be felt in California, where more than 15,000 federal inmates are housed. Meanwhile, because of federal court orders to reduce the number of inmates in its overfilled state prisons, California has been making strides to overcome the effects of the war on drugs. Voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition 47, which reduced some nonviolent, nonserious crimes to misdemeanors, and Proposition 57, which increased parole for felons convicted of nonviolent crimes.

This momentum cannot be lost as a result of destructive policies being implemented on the federal level. Sessions has not acknowledged the ravages perpetrated on communities of color by the war on drugs. Or that the stigma of a criminal conviction is compounded by racial discrimination in employment, further reducing economic opportunity for African Americans. The U.S. attorney general is pursuing policies destructive to the very communities he claims to care about. This is our message: Mr. Sessions, our lives, our families, and our pain will not serve as a prop in this farce. We refuse to serve as your excuse to destroy our communities.