Former Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. on Thursday pressed for action on criminal justice reform during a lecture in Washington, telling a packed courtroom that Congress should seize on rare bipartisan consensus to change sentencing laws.
Holder, who returned to Covington & Burling this year after serving for six years as the nation’s first black attorney general, said sentencing reform has transcended party lines, opening an opportunity “to act and to act now.”
Delivering the seventh annual Judge Thomas A. Flannery Lecture, Holder noted the nation’s prison population has risen sevenfold since the 1970s, from about 300,000 to 2.2. million. The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the world, Holder said in his remarks, and spends billions of dollars on prisons annually.
“America’s closest-to-scale competitor is Russia, where [Vladimir] Putin—the noted civil libertarian—and his government imprison about 450 people per 100,000, compared with our about 700 or so,” Holder said, drawing laughter with his reference to the Russian leader.
Holder said judges need more discretion in sentencing to mete out fairer sentences, particularly for first-time and nonviolent offenders. He added that racial disparities in incarceration rates have “bred distrust” of the criminal justice system.
In a plug for the “Smart On Crime” initiative he implemented as attorney general, Holder said he sought to reduce “draconian mandatory-minimum sentences” and step up investment in programs to reduce the likelihood of recidivism. Last year, he said, federal prosecutors went from seeking mandatory minimum penalties in two out of every three drug trafficking cases to only half of such cases—the lowest rate on record, according to the United States Sentencing Commission.
And for the first time in more than 40 years, the crime rate dropped at the same time as the prison population, he said.
“I take full credit for that,” Holder said, drawing more laughs.
In spite of noting the across-the-aisle agreement, Holder closed with the acknowledgment that Congress might not pass reform legislation. Regardless of congressional action, the reforms made within the Justice Department “must not be rescinded,” Holder said.
While he described the current length and rate of incarcerations in the United States as “unprecedented by both historical and comparative measures,” Holder said “now is the time, I believe, that we can be safely bold.”
“We must not let this moment pass or take half-measures,” he said. “It will likely be another generation before this issue is examined to this degree again.”
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