Attorney General Jeff Sessions recently urged federal prosecutors to take a more aggressive approach to charging defendants, including seeking mandatory minimum sentences. The guidelines, signed May 10, moved in a different direction than the Department of Justice had taken under President Barack Obama.
Under Obama, the department focused on prosecuting the most serious crimes and finding ways to keep minor or low-level offenders from serving long, mandatory sentences.
Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., made clear in a May 18 floor speech that he thought Sessions’ guidelines were ill-advised.
“Thanks in part to this initiative, President Obama became the first president since (Jimmy) Carter to leave the White House with a smaller federal prison population than when he took office,” Schumer said. We wondered if that was correct.
When we checked with Schumer’s office, a spokesman pointed us to research by the Pew Research Center, a widely trusted independent source.
Pew looked at federal Bureau of Prisons data going back to the 1920s. It found that not only was Obama the first president to see a drop in the federal prison population since Carter, but only four other presidents (Johnson, Kennedy, Truman and Hoover) saw a decline during their terms. Most of the presidents studied — nine, starting with Coolidge and ending with George W. Bush — saw the number of inmates increase.
We wondered whether Schumer was cherry-picking data from the much smaller pool of federal inmates. In 2015, the number of inmates in state-run prisons was almost seven times larger than the number of federal inmates, and the total of inmates in state and local facilities was more than than 10 times larger than the number in federal custody.
However, we found that the same trends held for state and local inmate populations: The number declined under Obama for the first time since at least the Carter years.
Obama signed the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 into law. It dramatically reduced a 100-to-1 sentencing disparity between offenses involving powder and crack cocaine. And his administration advocated for, and the U.S. Sentencing Commission approved, application of some of the new sentencing guidelines retroactively.
Sessions was among a number of Senate Republicans who spoke in favor of the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010. “I will not favor alterations that massively undercut the sentencing we have in place, but I definitely believe that the current system is not fair and that we are not able to defend the sentences that are required to be imposed under the law today,” he said in a 2009 Senate speech about the bill.
James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University, said he sees no significant omissions from Schumer’s statement. “The assertion is correct,” Fox said. “The reasons are partly strategic and partly being in the right office at the right time.
“During Obama’s administration, prosecutors were discouraged from seeking unnecessarily long prison sentences for nonviolent drug offenders, a practice that the Trump administration wants to change. In addition, the cumulative impact of a declining crime rate had an impact on prison populations.”
Our ruling
Schumer said, “President Obama became the first president since Carter to leave the White House with a smaller federal prison population than when he took office.”
The statistics bear out Schumer's assertion, so we rate it True.
“President Obama became the first president since Carter to leave the White House with a smaller federal prison population than when he took office.”
— Charles Schumer on Thursday, May 18th, 2017 in a Senate floor speech
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