A USA TODAY Op-Ed
By Piper Kerman
Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ directive to federal prosecutors last week to
pursue the most severe penalties possible when charging a person with a
crime was unsurprising coming from someone with his background and yet
still stunning in its misdirection.
During his confirmation
hearings, Sessions took great pains to deny allegations of racism. Yet
this action, more than any other, raises questions about his sincerity.
Sessions
says he wants to make America safer. Evidence shows that harsh
punishment is the exact wrong way to go. In 2014, the National Research
Council published an expansive report on The Growth of Incarceration in the United States
that examined the dramatic rise of the prison population and its
effects on our country. It concludes that “the evidence base
demonstrates that lengthy prison sentences are ineffective as a crime
control measure," and that we have long passed any point at which
increasing incarceration made us safer or better.
The memo from
Sessions puts the federal criminal system at odds with what many states
and municipalities have recognized and worked to change; broad reliance
on harsh punishment is profoundly counterproductive if what we want is
public safety.
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