By Allan Lengel
ticklethewire.com
Vanita Gupta, the former head of the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, has joined in the chorus of people critical of Attorney General Jeff Sessions new call for a harsher sentencing policy for drugs, Yahoo! News reports.
Gupta calls the policy “incredibly disappointing.”
Gupta, who also served as principal deputy assistant attorney general in the Obama administration, told Yahoo Global News Anchor Katie Couric that the new policy marked a “resounding step backwards into the 1980s of failed policies in our criminal justice system that resulted in us having the highest incarceration rate of industrialized nations in the world.”
“It’s a real throwback in a lot of ways, and very troubling,” Gupta said, adding that mass incarceration is ineffective as a means of promoting public safety.
