Senator Jeff Sessions – who accepted Donald Trump’s nomination as attorney general on Friday and now faces a Senate confirmation – has been down this road before.

Nominated by Ronald Reagan for an appointment as a district judge in 1986, the former US attorney was rejected by the Senate judiciary committee, for allegedly having made racist remarks to colleagues.

The response to his nomination from civil rights groups has been swift. “Our question for members of the United States Senate is simple: do they support racism, or do they not?” said Color of Change executive director Rashad Robinson. “In 1986, the Republican-controlled judiciary committee refused to confirm Sessions to the federal bench. In 2017, the Senate should be just as unequivocal: ‘no’ to racism means ‘no’ to Jeff Sessions.”

The testimony which ultimately seemed to sway the committee some 30 years ago suggested that Sessions referred to black coworkers as “boy”, told one to “be careful what you say to white folks” and surmised that a white lawyer in his office might be a “race traitor”. Sessions admitted some of the claims, but called the allegations he was a racist “ludicrous”.

Since then, the highly conservative Sessions has enjoyed a long civil career as the attorney general of Alabama, and as a senator for that state from 1996 to the present. Looking past the accusations of casual workplace racism to his record, the picture is bleak for activists and reformers beginning to consider what the implications would be of Sessions as the nation’s top lawyer. The senator has, throughout his career, been openly hostile to many of the criminal justice reform priorities that have increasingly garnered support from both parties and the American public in recent years.

Sessions strongly opposes the reduction of the US prison population, despite the fact that the nation incarcerates more people per capita than any other. “The wise approach is to slow down and evaluate the trends before accelerating prison population decline,” Sessions said in opposition to a bipartisan sentencing reform bill that would have decreased mandatory minimum sentencing, including for nonviolent drug crimes.

“Senator Sessions has opposed even modest reform,” said Kevin Ring, vice-president of Families against Mandatory Minimums, an advocacy group pushing for the curbing of harsh Reagan-era sentencing for drug crimes.

“Whether reform is on just hold, or completely dead remains to be seen,” Ring added. “From President Trump benign neglect may be the best we get.”

Ring holds out hope that Sessions’ declared priorities on terrorism and the department’s limited resources may curb his appetite for ramping up nonviolent drug prosecutions by the Department of Justice.

“Hopefully, if not a great sense of compassion or enlightenment, budget math is going to help push him in the right direction,” Ring said.

Sessions has expressed particular disdain for marijuana use, and even with national headwinds in their favor, the possible appointment has cannabis reformers reeling.

In one of the most startling revelations of Sessions’ failed district court nomination, a former coworker testified that Sessions once stated he found the Ku Klux Klan “OK, until I found out they smoked pot”. Sessions later defended the comment as a joke.

“If Trump allows Senator Sessions personal preference to dictate policy, we could be seeing a return to ‘reefer madness’ rhetoric and efforts to shut down voter-approved initiatives,” said Erik Altieri, executive director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (Norml).

Earlier this month, California, Nevada, Maine and Massachusetts doubled the number of states where the drug is completely legal for medical or recreational use to eight. A majority of Americans now live in states where marijuana has either been legalized or significantly decriminalized in recent years.

At the federal level the drug remains illegal, meaning that an especially zealous attorney general could influence federal agents to raid otherwise legal commercial operations, make arrests and seize property.

“Sessions has a long history of supporting what I like to call legalized robbery on behalf of the state, said Altieri, referring to the practice of civil forfeiture. “He could use this as a mechanism to shake down otherwise law-abiding business owners, rob them of their profits and put them in the federal coffers.”

Broadly speaking civil forfeiture allows law enforcement to take property from individuals suspected of crimes, even without charging or convicting them. In April 2015 Sessions said he was against “any reform” of civil forfeiture statutes.

Any failure to pursue meaningful criminal justice reform is bound to affect black Americans disproportionately, as they are overrepresented at every level of the system, from policing and use of force through arrest, detention and sentencing, something that increases the relevance of his alleged racist comments, no matter how long ago they occurred.

“When Trump rhetorically asked African Americans what they had to lose in this election, this was a big one: a justice department that believes justice for all is its highest mission,” said Lisa Graves, executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy. “With Sessions, ‘justice for some’ would likely be a more accurate motto.”