Attorney General Jeff Sessions and his new sidekick, tough-talking former Tennessee federal prosecutor Steven Cook, are appalling vestiges of the dark days of ineffective and draconian drug enforcement.



They want to drag us all back into the 1980s and '90s, the peak of America's inept drug war, which did nothing to stop the flow of narcotics but led to huge unintended consequences, like our epidemic of mass incarceration.



The number of prisoners in the U.S. quadrupled between 1980 and 2015, mostly black men with decades-long sentences - sometimes life without parole for a first-time drug offense. It was astronomically costly, and netted mostly street level drug dealers who were easily replaced.

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Now Sessions wants to double down on that debunked strategy. He's also setting the stage for a crackdown on marijuana, which is against federal law but legalized by many states, because he thinks it's "only slightly less awful" than heroin - which causes tens of thousands of overdose deaths annually. Pot? Zero. Martinis? Somewhere in between.



Yet beyond all this silly bluster, he and Cook are going to have a harder time than they think in stopping reforms. Yes, they can push harder on drug prosecutions, and ask for harsher sentences within existing federal statutes - which will hurt many people. But while their embrace of mandatory minimum sentences sends a terrible message, it's not clear how receptive lawmakers or states will be.



Cook says it's about protecting us "from violent felons and drug traffickers," but the Obama administration never stopped pushing long sentences for those people. What it did was try to step back from a failed strategy of slamming everyone with a 20-plus-year sentence - even non-violent first offenders like Kemba Smith, a 24-year-old college woman with no criminal record who got more than 20 years under a broad federal conspiracy law because her boyfriend was dealing.



Would Sessions really do that all over again, and put this young woman behind bars for decades? There certainly doesn't seem to be much appetite in Congress for increasing penalties; over the last eight years, there's been bipartisan support for rolling back mandatory minimums, and some major reform victories.

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Like Congress enacting legislation to reduce the disparity in sentencing between crack cocaine - for which mostly blacks got arrested - and powder cocaine, the drug of wealthier whites. Or new federal drug sentencing guidelines that give judges more freedom to offer leniency.



Conservatives also see the benefits of reducing cost overruns and the negative effects on families. And remember, only about 10 percent of the 2.3 million prisoners in the U.S. are in federal custody. The rest are in state jails and prisons, where bipartisan agreement to scale back the drug war is widespread.



States are more responsive to local pressure and have the added incentive of needing to balance their budgets. For many, corrections and prisons are among the biggest line items. And states increasingly recognize that long prison sentences don't reduce crime, they actually increase recidivism.



So great strides can still be made. Just look at New Jersey. We have reduced our prison population by about 25 percent over the last ten years, and at the same time, reduced crime and recidivism. With our new bail reform law, a national model, our county jail population is now down almost 30 percent.



For too long, our jails and prisons were overcrowded with low level offenders and addicts. Warehousing them only led to more recidivism. Now the focus is on treatment, as our Republican governor stresses. These were hard-learned lessons, and there's not much Sessions can do to make us forget them.

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