In 1982, an ambitious U.S. attorney named Jeff Sessions sent his boss in Washington, D.C. a letter offering some advice on matters above his pay grade. Ronald Reagan had won the presidency two years earlier and was reviving Richard Nixon’s harsh rhetoric on crime and drugs, promising Americans protection from “the human predator.” At the Justice Department, the legislative wish list included the introduction of harsh sentencing guidelines and bringing back the federal death penalty. But there was a problem: How were they going to get such measures by the liberal Democrats who ran the House?

In a memo I discovered at the National Archives, Sessions recommended a partisan, scorch-the-earth strategy in Congress, and a fear-mongering campaign with the public. The young U.S. attorney urged then-Attorney General William French Smith to take a more aggressive approach and begin the next round of negotiations by demanding “all the legislation we want.” And then the Democrats would hang themselves. “The liberals will buzz about with agonizing whines,” Sessions predicted. “After they have come forth and identified themselves as sympathizers for drug smugglers and other assorted criminals, congregating about the bait, they should then be flattened by the President in a full-scale campaign on behalf of the legislation.”

Reagan’s message to the public, selling his tough-on-crime measures, would then be beautifully simple, Sessions said: “We support stability and order; they wander about wringing their hands crying for the criminals while violence everywhere escalates.”

Thirty years later, Jeff Sessions himself is the boss at the Department of Justice, and he’s looking to inject new life into the war on crime. His methods haven’t changed, judging by his performance as attorney general thus far—or by the “law-and-order” fear-mongering of his close ally Donald Trump. Sessions recently appalled criminal-justice reformers by ordering his U.S. attorneys to file the most serious charges possible in criminal cases. That reversed guidance from his predecessor, Eric Holder, that encouraged the federal prosecutors to think twice before triggering the heaviest penalties.

It was also the latest salvo in a distorted campaign to convince Americans that the nation is on the brink of a violent-crime epidemic, and that naïve criminal-justice reformers are heightening the risk. Trump set the template during the GOP primary campaign. In his dark acceptance speech, he warned that “decades of progress made in bringing down crime are now being reversed by (the Obama) administration’s rollback of criminal enforcement.” He persistently linked immigration with crime, and of course, he rolled crime into his dystopic “American carnage” inaugural.