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Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the deep-fried racist from Alabama, would like to turn the clock back to pre-Emancipation, but will settle for a return to the good old days of Bill Clinton, the mega-incarcerating con man from Hope, Arkansas.

It is important to maintain an historical perspective on the actual policies that are being pushed by Republican and Democratic political actors, given the corporate medias practice of revising history daily.

Sessionsnew instructionsdemand that his U.S. attorneys charge and pursue the most serious, readily provable offense, rather than adjust criminal charges and sentencing recommendations based on the defendants individual history and circumstances. Sessions insists that federal prosecutors push all the legal buttons necessary to activate mandatory minimum sentences, with no judicial discretion.

Sessions policy is not tough on crime. It is dumb on crime,saidhis predecessor, Eric Holder, who executed Barack Obamas so-called Smart on Crime initiative in response to a growing wave of Black protest during Obamas second term.

Timid leadership In typical fashion, Obama led from behind on criminal justice issues, positioning himself on the cautious side of the emerging establishment consensus that the U.S. prison population must be shrunk. Thus, the Obama administration gave ample lip service to rolling back patently racist crack cocaine penalties, but once legislation to that effect was passed, fought successfully in the courts to prevent early release of inmates convicted under the law.

Instead, prisoners were forced to undergo individual review. The lucky ones, who fit Eric Holders strict release eligibility guidelines, weredribbled out of prisonas public relations exhibits of Obamas kindness.

Obama and Holder did tolerate, and even encourage, a degree of prosecutorial discretion in framing charges and recommending sentences although they proposed no fundamental reforms to the system.

The truth is, prosecutorial discretion is an arbitrary tool of the state, a matter of convenience and budget-adjusting that has nothing to do with justice and leaves the repressive architecture of mass Black incarceration totally intact as should be obvious, since all it took was a memo from Jeff Sessions to undo the phony reform.

Defending Holders policies What Sessions is actually defending are the racist policies championed by Eric Holder himself, when he was US attorney for the District of Columbia in the mid-90s. Sessions needs only to drive his time machine back two decades to be in total synch with the Eric Holder who made his political bones by imposing systemic racial profiling on the streets of Black Washington, D.C.

Holder kicked off his Operation Ceasefire campaign on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.s birthday in 1995, framing his anti-crime strategy in civil rights terms the right of Black people to be safe. On his watch, Driving While Young and Black became sufficient cause for a police stop and search and all the consequences that follow.

The people who will be stopped will be young Black males, overwhelmingly, Holder conceded. However, the greater good must be served. Young Black males make up 1 percent of the national population but account for 18 percent of the nations homicides, he said.

Holders contribution Holders policy of targeting suspicious vehicles for stops with the aim of conducting searches is detailed inJames Forman Jr.snew book,Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, an indispensable resource for understanding the roots of modern mass incarceration and the role the Black political (misleadership) class played in creating the monster.

The man who would later declare that some banks are too big to prosecute (Hows that for discretion?) helped establish a national precedent for stripping constitutional protections from the suspicious demographics of society. James Forman reports that Holders signature pretext stops are responsible for most of the racial disparity in traffic stops, nationwide.

Thus, Eric Holder has contributed mightily to the misery endured by, literally, millions in the U.S. prison gulag over the last several decades, while his feeble discretionary criminal justice reforms under Obama have no lasting institutional impact.

Worse, Eric Holders past is a model for Attorney General Jeff Sessions future.

Glen Ford is executive editor of BlackAgendaReport.com. E-mail him at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.

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Sessions, Holder and mass Black incarceration - Florida Courier