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Holder moves to rein in jail sentences

Attorney General Eric Holder is calling on the federal government to rein its use of one of the most ubiquitous tools in the war on crime — mandatory minimum sentences — and he's making a unilateral move to cut down on such sentences in drug cases even as Congress debates a broader rretreat from the once-popular sentencing concept.

"Some statutes that mandate inflexible sentences — regardless of the facts or conduct at issue in a particular case — reduce the discretion available to prosecutors, judges, and juries," Holder is to say in a speech to the American Bar Association on Monday in San Francisco, according to advance excerpts the released by the Justice Department. "They breed disrespect for the system. When applied indiscriminately, they do not serve public safety. They have had a disabling effect on communities. And they are ultimately counterproductive."

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Holder plans to announce that he's instructing federal prosecutors not to charge garden-variety drug dealers with crimes that lead to lengthy mandatory minimum sentences.

"Certain low-level, nonviolent drug offenders who have no ties to large-scale organizations, gangs, or cartels will no longer be charged with offenses that impose draconian mandatory minimum sentences. They now will be charged with offenses for which the accompanying sentences are better suited to their individual conduct, rather than excessive prison terms more appropriate for violent criminals or drug kingpins," the attorney general plans to say.

Holder is also expected to announce that he's expanding efforts to reduce federal prison populations by releasing elderly prisoners sooner, by allowing local U.S. attorneys not to prosecute some kinds of cases in federal court and by diverting "low-level offenders" to programs that keep them out of hardcore federal prisons.

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The initiative is aimed at building on growing bipartisan momentum at the state level — and to a lesser intent in Congress — to retreat from some of the harshest anti-crime measures adopted in the 1980s and '90s. As fear of violent crime has dropped precipitously in recent years, critics of lengthy federal sentences are trying to capitalize on the intensifying pressure on the federal budget to persuade Republicans and conservative Democrats to consider measures that might have been attacked a couple of decades ago as soft on crime.

Such efforts at the state level have caused prison populations there to start dropping, but the federal prisoner count has continued to grow to more than 219,000.

Until now, President Barack Obama has shown only a little interest at wading into the debate over the booming federal prison population. However, Holder plans to signal Monday that Obama is willing to make some effort to craft and support legislation to restore judges' discretion in some cases now governed by mandatory minimums.

"We must never stop being tough on crime. But we must also be smarter on crime," Holder is to say in his ABA speech. "Such legislation will ultimately save our country billions of dollars. And the president and I look forward to working with members of both parties to refine and advance these proposals."

(Also on POLITICO: U. S. wants drug lord jailed again)

While Holder's comments on issues like the Trayvon Martin case are carefully dissected and parsed, little attention has been paid as the attorney general amped up his rhetoric on the mandatory sentencing issue in recent months.

"Too many people go to too many prisons for far too long for no good law enforcement reason," the attorney general said in April before a convention of the Rev. Al Sharpton's National Action Network.

"We should ask ourselves as a society, are we putting the right people in jail for appropriate amounts of time?" Holder added at a House hearing a couple of weeks later. "Certain people need to go to jail and for long periods of time. ... I sentenced people to jail as a judge here in Washington, D.C. But I think there are some legitimate questions about the policies that we have had in place for a good number of years, and I think we should ask ourselves whether or not the prison population that we have, which is as high as it is, is an appropriate use of the limited resources that we have."