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Bill Keller and Tim Golden of The Marshall Project spoke with Holder in Brooklyn, where he was visiting a widely praised drug court. The transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
The Marshall Project: Youve been pretty outspoken on criminal justice issues across the board more outspoken than your boss, actually. What would you single out as your proudest accomplishment in the area of the criminal justice system, and what would you single out as your biggest disappointment?
Holder: In January 2013 I told the people in the Justice Department after the re-election that I wanted to focus on reforming the federal criminal justice system. I made an announcement in August of that year in San Francisco, when we rolled out the Smart on Crime initiative. It was a way of breaking some really entrenched thinking and asking prosecutors, investigators, the bureaucracy to think about how we do our jobs in a different way to ask the question of whether excessively long prison sentences for nonviolent offenders really served any good purpose, how we used enhancement papers, moving discretion to prosecutors and asking them to make individualized determinations about what they should do in cases, as opposed to have some big policy sent to them from Washington.
And I think that by and large not without opposition, to be totally honest the federal system has embraced that vision. And I think that we have started to see the kind of changes that I hoped we would see.
And the biggest disappointment?
Im proud of the fact that in 2010, I guess we reduced that ratio, the crack-powder ratio from 100-to-1 to about 17- or 18-to-1. Im still disappointed that, given the lack of a pharmacological distinction between crack and cocaine, the ratio is not 1-to-1. You know, it was the product of a lot of hard work that the president was intimately involved in. But I think he would agree with me that that number should be at 1-to-1.
Before the second term is over, could there be a push for a 1-to-1 ratio?
That is something that I know the president believes in, that I believe in. One of the things that Id like to see happen before the end of this administration is that there would be a drug court in every district in this country. As I speak to my successor, the 83rd attorney general, and as I speak to the president, Im going to push them to make that a goal for this administration, to have a drug court in every district by the end of Barack Obamas second term.
While were on the subject of drugs, a lot of people, including your choice to be the head of the Civil Rights Division, have pointed out that marijuana accounts for an awful lot of the excessive incarceration in this country, and a fair amount of the disproportionate numbers of African-Americans who are in that system. Youve held back from calling for marijuana decriminalization. What holds you back?
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