STATEMENT BY FORMER ATTORNEY GENERAL ERIC HOLDER
The Attorney General’s unwise and ill-informed decision to reverse the progress being made in
the Department of Justice's criminal justice reform efforts ignores a rare bipartisan political consensus that has formed around sentencing reform efforts and will take this nation back to a discredited past. In removing the discretion I vested in the men and women of the Department of
Justice to seek justice for the unique circumstances that each case presents, this administration
reveals its lack of faith in their judgment and integrity.
The policy announced today is not tough on crime. It is dumb on crime. It is an ideologically motivated, cookie-cutter approach that has only been proven to generate unfairly long sentences
that are often applied indiscriminately and do little to achieve long-term public safety. The Justice Department’s own data revealed just last year that, since I implemented Smart on Crime
policies in 2013, prosecutors have used the discretion I gave them to focus on more serious
drug cases. The data showed that while they brought fewer indictments carrying a mandatory
minimum sentence, the prosecutions of high-level drug defendants had risen and that cooperation and plea rates remained effectively the same. Abandoning this evidence-based progress
and turning back the clock to a discredited, emotionally-motivated, ideological policy also threatens the financial stability of the federal criminal justice system. These reversals will be both
substantively and financially ruinous, setting the Department back on a track to again spending
one third of its budget on incarcerating people, rather than preventing, detecting, or investigating
crime. Under the policy announced today the money spent solely on incarceration would rise
and lessen the ability of DOJ to hire prosecutors, agents and make grants to its state and local
partners.
This absurd reversal is driven by voices who have not only been discredited but until now have
been relegated to the fringes of this debate. Congress can reverse these actions by enacting the
criminal justice reform measures that were being considered as late as last year and that had
the support of Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and progressives. It should do so and
ensure that criminal justice policy is designed for twenty-first century realities and not beholden
to a failed twentieth century ideology.
Eric H. Holder, Jr.
May 12, 2017