The Holder memo, issued in August 2013, instructed his prosecutors to avoid charging certain defendants with drug offenses that would trigger long mandatory minimum sentences. Defendants who met a set of criteria such as not belonging to a large-scale drug trafficking organization, gang or cartel, qualified for lesser charges — and in turn less prison time — under Holder’s policy.
But Sessions’s new charging policy, outlined in a two-page memo and sent to more than 5,000 assistant U.S. attorneys across the country and all assistant attorneys general in Washington, orders prosecutors to “charge and pursue the most serious, readily provable offense” and rescinds Holder’s policy immediately.
The Sessions memo marks the first significant criminal justice effort by the Trump administration to bring back the toughest practices of the drug war, which had fallen out of favor in recent years with a bipartisan movement to undo the damaging effects of mass incarceration.
“This policy fully utilizes the tools Congress has given us,” the attorney general’s memo says. “By definition, the most serious offenses are those that carry the most substantial guidelines sentence, including mandatory minimum sentences.”
[How Jeff Sessions wants to bring back the war on drugs]
Civil liberties advocates, though, condemned the measure as a return to ineffective policies.
“Jeff Sessions is pushing federal prosecutors to reverse progress and repeat a failed experiment — the War on Drugs — that has devastated the lives and rights of millions of Americans, ripping apart families and communities and setting millions, particularly Black people and other people of color, on a vicious cycle of incarceration,” Udi Ofer, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Campaign for Smart Justice, said in a statement. “It failed for 40 years, and from the halls of state legislatures to the ballot box, the American people have said with a clear voice that they want commonsense reforms to sentencing policy, and not a return to the draconian policies that have already cost us too much.”
Read the complete article at The Washington Post
Imagine going to the polls on Election Day and discovering that your ballot could be collected and reviewed by the
ACLU Blueprints Offer Vision to Cut US Incarceration Rate in Half by Prioritizing 'People Over Prisons' 
"These disasters drag into the light exactly who is already being thrown away," notes Naomi Klein 
How about some good news? Kansas Democratic Representative advances bill for Native Peoples. 
What mattered was that he showed up — that he put himself in front of the people whose opinions on
On a night of Democratic victories, one of the most significant wins came in Virginia, where the party held onto
A seismic political battle that could send shockwaves all the way to the White House was launched last week in
In an interview with Reuters conducted a month after he took office, Donald Trump asserted that the U.S. had “fallen
Attorney General Jeff Sessions overturned the sweeping criminal charging policy of former attorney general Eric H. Holder Jr. and directed
The news that the White House and Republican congressional leaders have given up on passing the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is
If you read the headlines, Donald Trump’s election has killed the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The headlines have it wrong. 
Democratic senator from Massachusetts offers fresh criticism of trade deal in new video 
Today’s World Trade Organization (WTO) ruling against the U.S. country-of-origin meat labels (COOL) that consumers rely on to make informed
Negotiations on the Trans-Pacific Partnership—a trade agreement between 12 nations—ended earlier this week. The likely passage of the agreement means
'For thousands of women to die unnecessary of breast cancer because of the TPP is a horrible, cruel, premeditated, and
A razor-thin Senate vote Tuesday put President Obama on the cusp of claiming victory for his ambitious international trade agenda,
The Fast Track trade authority package was rejected Friday because two years of effort by a vast corporate coalition, the
It just doesn't get more cynical than this. Note that we're talking about a bipartisan trade deal, thanks to 14