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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.
More at Washington Post, Fox News, Huffington Post, The Hill
Memorandum on Department Charging and Sentencing Policy - US Department of Justice PDF
(Score: 1) by Gault.Drakkor on Tuesday May 16 2017, @09:26PM
As I understand it, the USA governmental system design is heavily based on the Roman Republic.
Only citizens may vote. The citizens are the land owners/aristocrats. The vast majority of the people are only residents. Thats the way USA was for the first ~70 years of time as well in terms of voting. USA was explicitly set up from the initial start to favor the wealthy. The voting system ensures there are only two parties. It is broken by design? No, because it has worked/lasted a long time, it works mostly as intended. And one those intended things is being able to get laws in place that allow discrimination against the poor.
My point? It will not be easy removing the upper class from control when it was explicitly designed for them to be in control.
One possible option I see is to linearize income + wealth: tax wealth progressively say .5% per magnitude starting at 1% at the million dollars of equity.