Coming: A New Crime Wave

A wave of sentencing reform rolling across the country threatens to undo the steady gains America has made in cutting crime over the past quarter century, a federal prosecutor warned Wednesday.

Speaking on “The Laura Ingraham Show,” National Association of Assistant United States Attorneys President Steve Cook said the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act of 2015 would reverse those gains by letting dangerous criminals out of prison.

“It will make reductions in sentences to be imposed on armed career criminals, and it will make those retroactive,” said Cook. “That will mean that thousands of armed career criminals will be eligible for release from prison.”

Sponsored by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, the sentencing reform bill enjoys strong bipartisan support. It would cut mandatory-minimum sentences for some offenses. Supporters argue it would save taxpayer dollars and ease prison overcrowding without endangering Americans.

But Cook said that contrary to popular opinion, federal prisons are not filled with nonviolent drug users caught with a little bit of marijuana.

“That is not who’s in federal prison,” he said, pointing to statistics showing that less than 1 percent of prisoners are serving time for drug use.

Cook said the bill would reduce punishment for serial violent offenders, such as criminals who have committed numerous carjackings.

“It will reduce the sentences and, again, make those reductions retroactive,” he said. “Again, thousands of violent offenders will be eligible for early release.”

Cook said it also would impede the ability of prosecutors to plea bargain with offenders and build cases against co-conspirators. Without the threat of mandatory-minimum sentences, fewer defendants are apt to cooperate with law-enforcement investigators, he said.

“The reality is that the offenders are there for serious, high-level drug trafficking,” he said.

Cook said that a drug dealer, for instance, must be convicted of selling heroin in amounts of at least a kilogram to trigger a 10-year mandatory-minimum sentence.

Cook called recidivism rates, reported by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, “scary.” About 77 percent of criminals are arrested again within five years of release.

He said it is no coincidence that the crime rate peaked in about 1991 and has been tumbling ever since. He said the violent crime rate, which had been cut in half by 2014, began falling several years after stiffer penalties first took effect.

“Congress gave us those tools that are now being attacked in the mid-’80s,” he said.

Cook said he also does not consider the spike in murders in some American cities last year to be a coincidence. It is the inevitable result of thousands of illegal immigrants convicted of crimes that the Obama administration released without deporting, he suggested.

“When you combine that with the mass release from federal prison and sentencing reform across the country, what you see is a spike in violent crime across the country in major cities,” he said.