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Eric Holder Was Great on Drugs Will his successor throw it all away?
By ETHAN NADELMANN
September 26, 2014
Attorney General Eric Holder’s resignation represents a scary moment for Americans who care about ending both marijuana prohibition and the nation’s infatuation with mass incarceration. I wouldn't have said that two years ago but I say it without reservation now.
During their first term, both President Obama and the attorney general would privately respond to criticisms of their lackluster record on reforming drug and criminal justice policies by insisting that it needed to be a second-term priority, if they got the chance. For Holder in particular, this was, he told friends, a legacy issue, one he hoped would shape how his years in office were remembered. His sentiments were likely shared by Obama, for whom the hypocrisy of interrupting and derailing the lives of so many young people, especially black and brown, for doing what he too once did, was inescapable. As he told the New Yorker’s David Remnick, “We should not be locking up kids or individual users for long stretches of jail time when some of the folks who are writing those laws have probably done the same thing.”
In the weeks following his re-election, Obama added: “There are millions of lives out there that are being destroyed or distorted because we haven’t fully thought through our [criminal justice] process.” The real leadership on broader sentencing reform, however, came from Eric Holder.
In August of 2013, the attorney general issued new guidelines to federal prosecutors designed to reduce the number of people charged with harsh mandatory minimum sentences. In November, speaking in Medellin, Colombia, to an inter-American gathering of public security ministers, he condemned the mass incarceration policies in his own country as “both inadvisable and unsustainable.” “It carries,” he said, “both human and moral costs that are too much to bear.”
Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/st...-was-great-on-drugs-111354.html#ixzz3EX4243SO
By ETHAN NADELMANN
September 26, 2014
Attorney General Eric Holder’s resignation represents a scary moment for Americans who care about ending both marijuana prohibition and the nation’s infatuation with mass incarceration. I wouldn't have said that two years ago but I say it without reservation now.
During their first term, both President Obama and the attorney general would privately respond to criticisms of their lackluster record on reforming drug and criminal justice policies by insisting that it needed to be a second-term priority, if they got the chance. For Holder in particular, this was, he told friends, a legacy issue, one he hoped would shape how his years in office were remembered. His sentiments were likely shared by Obama, for whom the hypocrisy of interrupting and derailing the lives of so many young people, especially black and brown, for doing what he too once did, was inescapable. As he told the New Yorker’s David Remnick, “We should not be locking up kids or individual users for long stretches of jail time when some of the folks who are writing those laws have probably done the same thing.”
In the weeks following his re-election, Obama added: “There are millions of lives out there that are being destroyed or distorted because we haven’t fully thought through our [criminal justice] process.” The real leadership on broader sentencing reform, however, came from Eric Holder.
In August of 2013, the attorney general issued new guidelines to federal prosecutors designed to reduce the number of people charged with harsh mandatory minimum sentences. In November, speaking in Medellin, Colombia, to an inter-American gathering of public security ministers, he condemned the mass incarceration policies in his own country as “both inadvisable and unsustainable.” “It carries,” he said, “both human and moral costs that are too much to bear.”
Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/st...-was-great-on-drugs-111354.html#ixzz3EX4243SO
