Reviewing how crime and punishment (but not AG Sessions' approaches) have changed in recent decades

Over at FiveThirtyEight, Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux has this extended piece that is a kind of retrospective on the evolution of crime and punishment in the US over the last 30 years, with a particular focus on the perspectives of AG Sessions. The piece is headlined "Jeff Sessions Is Trying To Take Criminal Justice Back To The 1990s," and here is how it gets started:

Thursday is the first anniversary of Jeff Sessions’s confirmation as attorney general. Over the past year, he has announced that he would seek to increase the use of the federal death penalty; reversed a series of Obama-era memos that instructed federal prosecutors not to go after the marijuana industry in the states that have legalized it; and directed prosecutors to slap drug suspects with the most serious charge they can prove.

None of these policies would have seemed out of place 30 years ago. And, in fact, it’s clear that Sessions has set his sights on returning the country’s criminal justice system to the days of harsh penalties for crime and hardline drug laws. The problem: A lot has changed over the last three decades — in particular, crime and our understanding of how to fight it.

Thirty years ago, there were open-air drug markets in big cities from New York to Los Angeles, residents of those cities were robbed or even killed on public transportation, and the murder rate was near its all-time high. At the crest of the crime wave, harsher penalties for criminals like mandatory minimum sentences and expanded use of the death penalty seemed like a reasonable response to a devastating national crisis, and most Americans supported them.

But today, the crime rate is much lower than in the 1990s, and Sessions’s policies are out of step with most public opinion. Moreover, many criminologists view his strategy as a throwback that’s unlikely to significantly curb violence or drug crime.

That’s because since these policies were implemented, decades of social science research has led experts like David Kennedy, a professor of criminal justice at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, to conclude that they don’t work well enough to justify their cost. “The evidence shows that they’re expensive, there’s enormous human damage, and they’re not actually effective in deterring crime,” he said.

Sessions has long established himself as a hard-liner on criminal justice issues: As Alabama’s attorney general, he proposed a crime bill that would have made the death penalty mandatory for a second conviction for drug trafficking. As the U.S. attorney general, he’s billed his new policies as a rejection of the “soft” strategies on crime that characterized the Obama administration, arguing that capital punishment and long sentences deter criminals and that pot is a “gateway drug” for harder substances and addiction.

There’s no question that crime did start to drop precipitously during the era of harsher penalties. And in 2010, the homicide rate hit a four-decade low, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Though most experts agree that the harsher strategies alone can’t explain the decline, there’s still no consensus about why the crime rate started to drop three decades ago. Scholars do note that it was already falling before many tough-on-crime measures were widely introduced, and they have offered theories from improved policing to the roaring economic growth of the 1990s to explain the change.

Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, said Sessions deserves some credit for calling attention to the recent uptick in the murder rate, which rose for the second consecutive year in 2016 after a 25-year decline. But Rosenfeld, who studies the causes behind crime rate shifts, and other mainstream criminal justice experts reject the notion that the Obama-era criminal justice reforms, like the decision not to pursue mandatory minimum sentences for low-level drug offenders, caused an increase in violent crime. Instead, Rosenfeld blames the increased violence in part on the drug market, with more demand for heroin because of the opioid epidemic. Rosenfeld also said that tensions between African-American communities and the police could be a factor.

And there’s even debate about whether the violent crime rate — as opposed to just the murder rate — is actually increasing. With a criminal justice outlook that seems more suited to the 1990s than today, Sessions finds himself implementing policies on sentencing, capital punishment and drug enforcement — particularly marijuana — that are out of sync with much of the country.