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Approach to violent crime harkens back to '80s, '90s

The Daily Progress - 4/9/2017

U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions came to Richmond on March 15 to announce his strategy to reduce violent crime.

His "new" strategy isn't actually new. Rather, it calls for a return to enforcement policies that were implemented in the 1980s and '90s, when Sessions served as a federal prosecutor in Alabama. This dangerously narrow approach to violent crime threatens to take us backward, not forward. I fear it will be expensive, ineffective, and bring serious collateral consequences to the very communities the policy seeks to protect.

My perspective on this issue is informed by my long career as a federal prosecutor. As an assistant U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., in 2002, I tried a lengthy federal racketeering case against a violent gang that was responsible for 31 murders in an around Washington. As U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia from 2009-2014, I worked with state and local partners to implement place-based strategies to target violence in communities large and small across Virginia. All of that experience gives me a front-line perspective of the problem of violence in America.

I relied upon that experience and worked with Attorney General Eric Holder and other veteran federal prosecutors to conceive and implement the Department of Justice's Anti-Violence Strategy in 2011. Our approach was strikingly different from the old fashioned law-and-order approach outlined in Richmond.

Our strategy directed federal prosecutors to target their enforcement efforts toward the most violent repeat offenders in communities. Rather than a dragnet approach that brought every offender in a particular community into federal court, we encouraged intelligence-driven enforcement that reserved the harsh treatment of federal incarceration for leaders and managers who perpetuate violence in communities.

We also instructed federal prosecutors to identify and support ongoing prevention efforts in the same neighborhoods where such targeted enforcement takes place.

Finally, we provided resources to federal prosecutors to encourage transition programs that reduce the barriers to successful re-entry faced by men and women returning to these same communities from periods of incarceration.

We called this approach the "three-legged stool" of community safety, as it relied on the simultaneous pursuit of targeted enforcement, crime prevention, and viable re-entry in communities afflicted with persistent levels of violent crime.

Attorney General Sessions' approach ignores two essential legs of that stool. It fails to recognize the benefits of prevention programs that provide diversion opportunities for young men and women who may be tempted to join a gang or use a gun. It also fails to mention re-entry solutions that provide support for people returning to our communities from periods of incarceration. Without support for prevention and re-entry, we may facilitate a revolving door of violence in communities, with new gangs and other offenders stepping in to replace those who are incarcerated in an endless cycle of destruction.

The attorney general seems to believe that we can arrest our way to public safety. This fails to realize that a comprehensive approach that combines targeted enforcement with support for prevention and re-entry is the more certain path to truly safe communities. It is a pogo-stick approach, relying on enforcement-only solutions.

The pogo stick is not only ineffective, but also dangerous. It may lead to some of the negative consequences of the increased levels of federal enforcement we saw in the '80s and '90s.

My perspective from the front line is that we incarcerated too many people during that period of time, particularly in communities of color. Not every felon in possession of a firearm needs to go to federal prison for five years. The sanction of federal incarceration should be reserved for truly dangerous offenders who need to be removed from communities. Dragnet policing and prosecution is both overly inclusive and expensive, as it diverts scarce resources away from other areas with more lasting impact.

There are neighborhoods in Richmond that have been ravaged by both violence and mass incarceration. We will do more for those communities by bringing together stakeholders beyond law enforcement and pursuing comprehensive strategies.

The three-legged stool is both cheaper and more effective than the pogo stick. I hope that the career professionals within the Department of Justice help Attorney General Sessions realize that we've learned a lot since the 1980s and convince him to reinforce his strategy with continued support for the other two legs of the stool.