'Get "Them" Off the Streets'

In recent years, the Department of Justice had begun to veer away from the harsh sentencing guidelines that were implemented in the 1980s and ’90s, especially those used to lock up low-level, nonviolent drug offenders. But Trump-appointed Attorney General Jeff Sessions is on course to stop those changes.

In a new set of guidelines issued in May 2017, Sessions instructed prosecutors to pursue charges for the most serious offense possible, including charges that carried harsh sentences and mandatory minimums. Sessions described these guidelines as “moral and just” and praised them for producing “consistency.”

But humans are not uniform and consistent, and neither are their crimes. U.S. District Court Judge John Coughenour believes mandatory minimums and sentencing guidelines make sentencing far too easy. “I considered sentencing to be an art and not a science,” Coughenour told The Atlantic in 2016. “And it’s not a science. It’s a human being dealing with other human beings.”

Not to mention: The long sentences doled out by mandatory minimums are neither effective nor cost-efficient. Instead, states such as Texas have shown that it’s possible to reduce both crime and incarceration simultaneously, in part by investing more money into treatment and probation programs rather than new prisons.

Since 2012, the Supreme Court has deemed it unconstitutional to mandate that youth who commit certain kinds of crime be sentenced to life without parole, citing research on adolescent brain development to support its ruling. However, states and courts can still choose to sentence people to life without parole for crimes they committed as youth. Though 19 states and the District of Columbia have opted to outlaw life without parole for juveniles, this sentence is still legal in a majority of states, giving the U.S. the embarrassing distinction of being the only nation in the world to sentence offenders to life without parole for crimes they committed as juveniles.

And with Sessions at the helm of the Justice Department, it seems likely that life without parole will remain an option for those sentencing juvenile offenders. “We need to use every lawful tool we have to get the most violent offenders off our streets,” Sessions told an international gathering of law enforcement officers earlier this year. “The more of them we take off the streets so they can no longer harm others, the safer our neighborhoods will be.”