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Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Friday that he has directed his federal prosecutors to pursue the most severe penalties possible, including mandatory minimum sentences, in his first step toward a return to the war on drugs of the 1980s and 1990s that resulted in long sentences for many minority defendants and packed U.S. prisons.
[...] In the later years of the Obama administration, a bipartisan consensus emerged on Capitol Hill for sentencing reform legislation, which Sessions opposed and successfully worked to derail.
In a two-page memo to federal prosecutors across the country, Sessions overturned former attorney general Eric H. Holder's sweeping criminal charging policy that instructed his prosecutors to avoid charging certain defendants with offenses that would trigger long mandatory minimum sentences. In its place, Sessions told his more than 5,000 assistant U.S. attorneys to charge defendants with the most serious crimes, carrying the toughest penalties.
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Memorandum on Department Charging and Sentencing Policy - US Department of Justice PDF
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 16 2017, @12:27PM
The social cost is even higher. By making drugs illegal, they also get more expensive (demand and supply, economics 101), which means the addicts need more money to pay for it. More need of money combined with less ability to obtain it legally means more crime.
Of course if your goal is to fill up the prisons and increase police spending, you'll welcome the additional crime, as more criminals means more people in prison, and more crime means people are more likely to agree to more and better equipped police, as well as more permissions given to the police.