Was Jeff Sessions Wrong About Federal Sentencing Reform?

In 2018, Attorney General Jeff Sessions fought hard against the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act, a bill that would have rolled back some mandatory minimums and given much-needed help to people coming home from prison. We thought he was wrong, and the prison data backed that up. This post, written at the time, explains why.

Update (October 2026): Jeff Sessions left office as Attorney General on November 7, 2018. The bill discussed here never passed on its own, but several of its sentencing changes became law weeks later in the First Step Act of 2018. Justice Department charging policy has also changed more than once since 2018, so the policies described below are history, not current rules. See our First Step Act summary for today's law.

The bill had been shot down several years earlier, and in 2018 it was back in play.

How Sessions tried to block sentencing reform

One cabinet official did everything he could to stop the bill: Attorney General Jeff Sessions. In a February 2018 letter, he argued that passing it would lead to crime-filled streets. He warned that it would cut sentences for "a highly dangerous cohort of criminals" and called passing it "a grave error."

His opposition was no surprise. As a senator, Sessions helped stop an earlier version of the bill that had support from both parties. As Attorney General, he made drug crimes and illegal immigration top priorities. In our view, he did everything he could to add to the country's unfair mass incarceration problem, even though overly harsh sentences in drug cases only make prison crowding worse.

In May 2017, Sessions told federal prosecutors to charge the most serious offense they could prove. In drug cases, that often meant charges carrying a mandatory minimum, the lowest sentence a judge is allowed to give. Those mandatory minimums continue to criminalize drug addiction and fall hardest on minorities. We agreed with critics who said Sessions's thinking was about 30 years behind the rest of the country. That kind of thinking worked directly against sentencing reform.

Strangest of all, at a time when marijuana legalization was growing more popular, Sessions kept claiming that marijuana fueled the opioid epidemic. Despite a large body of evidence to the contrary, he held on to the idea that marijuana is a "gateway drug" to stronger drugs.

That out-of-step thinking is why, in January 2018, he withdrew Obama-era guidance that had told prosecutors not to focus on marijuana cases in states where marijuana is legal. In our view, that created an unnecessary conflict between federal and state governments.

Did the facts back Sessions up?

Sessions held fast to the idea that mandatory minimums in drug cases are necessary. But mandatory minimum laws passed in the 1980s and 1990s are a major reason the United States imprisons more of its people than any other country in the world. The "war on drugs" and "tough on crime" policies of 30 years ago sent prison populations soaring.

In a November 2017 letter, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights pointed out that:

• Over the prior two decades, the federal prison population grew by almost 790%.
• From 1980 to 2013, federal prisons added almost 6,000 more people each year.
• Federal prisons were running about 13% over capacity.
• The Bureau of Prisons' $7.1 billion budget request for 2018 was more than 25% of the Justice Department's whole budget.

Research reports cited in the letter suggest that mandatory minimums are a major reason the prison population keeps growing. They make clear that reform is needed:

• Longer expected time served, especially for drug crimes, drove about half of federal prison growth from 1998 to 2010.
• Congress's elimination of parole, plus longer sentences, increased how much time people were expected to serve.
• Longer time served by people convicted of drug crimes alone accounted for almost one-third of federal prison growth from 1998 to 2010.
• People convicted of drug crimes made up about 46% of federal prisoners, almost half.

Clearly, Sessions's decades-old "tough on crime" approach needed to be retired. Law enforcement and the courts need to be smarter about which crimes to prioritize. Throwing the book at people, mostly drug users, does not seem to be solving anything.

Mandatory minimums also stop judges from weighing a person's background and circumstances. And they fall hardest on people of color. The original article noted that Black and Latino Americans made up about 33% of the U.S. population combined, but about 70% of the federal prison population.

A good start

By tackling mandatory minimums, the bill then in the Senate Judiciary Committee was good legislation. It would have reduced the federal prison population. But it was far from perfect. It added some new mandatory minimums and did not go far enough to make drug sentences more reasonable. Still, we have to start somewhere, and this bill was a good place to begin.

Showing that Sessions was on the wrong side of history, and limiting his influence on the issue, was another good place to start.

Facing a federal sentence? Book a consultation to talk it through with Brandon Sample.