Jeff Sessions Announces Justice Department Will Increase Asset Forfeiture

> Sessions also formally withdrew a signature part of Attorney General Eric Holder's "Smart on Crime" initiative, which sought to target the most serious crimes and reduce the number of defendants charged with non-violent drug offenses that would otherwise trigger mandatory minimum sentences.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/12/politics/sessions-criminal-cha...

Without even considering the rest of the Trump administration, Sessions is taking this country backwards and encouraging policies we already know don't work.

That said, the reality is that the asset forfeiture regulations are not well-formed, and the oversight is very far from where it needs to be given the extreme power these laws give to the law enforcement authorities. As such, this effectively leads to a money grab in some areas.

This just strikes me as a case of making a potentially reasonable policy (if that's one's perspective on the world), but not creating the proper infrastructure to support it in a transparent way that mainstream citizens would find reasonable. As such, it is very prone to abuse.

Note also that the biggest hauls give some federal agencies a tremendous amount budget flexibility. Again, the oversight for this is not well-formed, perhaps intentionally.

Note that I personally do not agree with this line of thinking, but I just wanted to explain the perspectives of others who support these decisions.

Really? It's the same as it's ever been...they want more money, more control and more time.

This decline shows itself in people like Trump or the Brexit.

The problem is that "Asset Forfeiture" appears to work in making drug dealing (and other black market criminal activities) a much more risky business.

The question is how do we balance something that works with restoring property to law-abiding citizens when police make a mistake?

There seems to be little to no process around this.

There will be resistance to installing processes because criminals will use it to reclaim their dirty money and more process will cost time and money, making forfeiture less effective.

If you subscribe to the view that the war on drugs is/was chiefly motivated by white supremacy and the preservation of a minority right-wing establishment (as Ehrlichman apparently did [1]), it's arguably been a success.

The administration is supported by a minority of the electorate, the administration is a right-wing regime filled with unrepentant bigots, the administration wants the war on drugs to be maintained and intensified. These things fit together in a very unsurprising way, once one can get over the shock of just how petty and vile the fabulously wealthy elites running the government turn out to be.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ehrlichman#War_on_drugs

Is it? Why don't we try and see?

I really would like to see some stats before forming an opinion on emotions alone. After all, it was emotions that landed us here.

Some people just don't want to rejoin society. Why choose life when you've got heroin? Pretty sure that rehab doesn't have a good success rate in those situations.