This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, May 22nd, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions is doing away with guidance undertaken by former Attorney General

Eric Holder.

Sessions will ask prosecutors to seek out the

harshest penalties for people accused of crimes.

Kevin Ring, President of Families Against Mandatory Minimum, says the new Sessions guidance will trigger more mandatory minimums and will

swell federal prisons without doing much about crime.

Jeff Sessions as attorney general is seems most concerned with police and prosecutors being able to have as wide a

birth as possible when it comes to prosecuting crimes and so he's essentially withdrawn or tossed out this holder guidance from the previous administration on how to handle

crimes. First, what was in the famous holder letter and what essentially

has Jeff Sessions done?

Well, in the past few administrations, the attorney general has issued a memo, a charging

memo is what it's called. It gives guidance to the U.S. attorneys throughout the country,

giving them basically a strategy or guidance

on how to prosecute cases.

In the Ashcroft era, they were told to charge

to the gills, prosecute as harshly as you could the most readily provable

offense if they carried the longest punishment and so they put their thumb on the

scale in that way.

Attorney General Holder, with what he,

as part of what he called the Smart on Crime Initiative,

...