The new policy will no doubt increase both federal prosecutions and increase prison populations, a fact that will echo issues into the future.
In a letter to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, Conyers, D-Detroit, noted that Sessions' recommendation to President Donald Trump to fire Comey on Tuesday was based on a memo prepared by Rosenstein that directly related to Comey's handling of an investigation during last year's campaign into former Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton's use of a private e-mail server. Some involved in criminal justice during the drug war feared the human impact would look similar.
His memo replaced the orders of former Attorney General Eric Holder, who in 2013 encouraged prosecutors to consider the individual circumstances of a case and to exercise discretion in charging drug crimes.
Mr Sessions' change in policy furthers the discrimination in the U.S. criminal justice system.
"This policy shift flies in the face of the growing bipartisan consensus that we need to reduce-not increase-the length of prison sentences for nonviolent drug offenders", Durbin said in a statement Friday. If you want to collect a drug debt, you can't file a lawsuit in court. "You collect it by the barrel of a gun".
Virtually every person who faces federal drug charges can now expect to receive a stiff mandatory-minimum sentence under a new policy announced late Thursday by Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The memo acknowledges there will be cases in which "good judgment" will permit a prosecutor to bend that rule.
The directive does allow prosecutors to show leniency in the cases that "would result in an injustice", but in all other cases, Sessions is ordering prosecutors to go for the throat.
But any exceptions will need to be approved by top supervisors, and the reasons must be documented, allowing the Justice Department to track the handling of such cases by its 94 us attorney's offices.
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"It is a core principle that prosecutors should charge and pursue the most serious, readily provable offense", Sessions wrote.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions has directed prosecutors to make an about-face on criminal justice reform efforts made by the Obama administration.
Holder predicted Sessions' directive will be "substantively and financially ruinous" and will force the agency to revert to the days of spending "one third of its budget in incarcerating people, rather than preventing, detecting or investigating crime". Holder himself responded, calling the policy "dumb on crime", "ideologically motivated", and "cookie cutter". Together, those changes led to a sharp drop in the federal prison population, from 220,000 in 2013 to the current level of 190,000. Almost half of those inmates are in custody for drug crimes, records show.
In particular, Sessions' memo resurrects federal drug laws' emphasis on mandatory minimum sentencing requirements.
The head of the National Association of Assistant United States Attorneys praised the new policy and said it will "restore the tools" that Congress created for federal prosecutors to use against drug traffickers and gangsters. "Congress can reverse these actions by enacting the criminal justice reform measures that were being considered as late as previous year and that had the support of Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and progressives".
Opponents of the Holder Memo felt it demanded federal prosecutors ignore the will of Congress and deliberately circumvent the sentencing structure imposed by the legislature. Sessions held a news conference on the new policy earlier Friday and Trump has said he made a decision to fire Comey because the President thought he was doing a bad job and for being a "showboat".
"They deserve to be un-handcuffed and not micromanaged from Washington", he said.
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