DoJ vs Mass Incarceration

Department of Justice Announces "Smart on Crime" program to reduce Mass Incarceration. From the Huffington Post: The Justice Department will avoid charging certain low-level and nonviolent drug offenders with crimes that carry mandatory minimums, Attorney General Eric Holder will announce Monday. The policy shift will allow certain defendants -- those without ties to large-scale organizations, gangs or cartels -- to avoid what Holder called "draconian mandatory minimum sentences." Holder, in a speech before the American Bar Association in San Francisco on Monday, will also announce that the Justice Department is giving U.S. attorneys throughout the country a greater amount of prosecutorial discretion. "Some issues are best handled at the state or local level," Holder will say, according to prepared remarks provided by the Justice Department. "And that’s why I have directed the United States Attorney community to develop specific, locally-tailored guidelines -- consistent with our national priorities -- for determining when federal charges should be filed, and when they should not." Read the full story here.

Morals, Economics ... and Tactics

From the NY Times: Saying that “too many Americans go to too many prisons for far too long and for no good law enforcement reason,” Mr. Holder is planning to justify his policy push in both moral and economic terms. One tactic to ease overcrowding in federal prisons will be ordering prosecutors to omit listing quantities of illegal substances in indictments for low-level drug cases, sidestepping federal laws that impose strict mandatory minimum sentences for drug-related offenses. Read the full story here. (Justice Dept. Seeks to Curtail Stiff Drug Sentences) More Ways to Resist Mass Incarceration – The New Jim Crow & Mass Incarceration on UUA.org UUs Resisting New Jim Crow & Mass Incarceration Facebook Group Youth Caucus statement for AIW 2 on the racist mistreatment by police of young people of color. Buy “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color-blindness - See more at: http://blueboat.blogs.uua.org/2013/08/12/stops-and-frisks-racially-prof…