Late Thursday night, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a man who looks like the type to spend a housewarming party happily talking your ear off about the “War of Northern Aggression” as you frantically look around for a reason to extricate yourself from the conversation, quietly ordered Department of Justice prosecutors to resume the dated practice of filing the most serious provable charges and pursuing the harshest possible sentences against federal criminal defendants. This directive rolls back Obama-era policies that took aim at the onerous sentences often imposed on nonviolent drug offenders, and it will have an immediate and disproportionate impact on people of color. It is a gratuitously cruel move that lacks any empirical justification, and the meager rationale that Sessions offers in support of it is, to be frank, a breathtakingly disingenuous crock.

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