Trumpism’s goal is, at least in part, to destroy the progress achieved under the Obama administration - NBC Opinion

Trumpism’s goal is, at least in part, to destroy the progress achieved under the Obama administration.

Almost immediately after Sessions was sworn in, he rescinded an Obama administration memorandum to phase out the federal justice system’s use of private prisons. Though Obama's guidance would not have ended the scourge of the Prison Industrial Complex, it was a crucial step in the reform process.

Private prisons are less efficient, provide diminished access to health care and can often be vulnerable to corruption. They operate on market principles rather than societal or community ones. Some are incentivized to warehouse human beings.

Our mass incarceration problem is compounded by overly aggressive policing. In some cities or regions, federal review of local law enforcement has been able to serve as a check when policing goes wrong. But Sessions has registered his distaste for federal oversight of local law enforcement. This may signal an end to consent decrees — a critical process developed in wake of the 1994 uprising following the Rodney King trial. Consent decrees allow the federal government to enter into court-enforceable agreements with local police forces, based on DOJ reports documenting civil rights abuses.

The Obama Justice Department’s report on the Ferguson police department was among the most damning. While Sessions dismissed the data as “anecdotal,” the report noted that two-thirds of African Americans living in Ferguson accounted for more than 90 percent of the arrests between 2012 and 2014.

Sessions has also “empowered” U.S. attorneys to seek the harshest penalties possible for drug crimes. This is a direct reversal of Holders’ efforts to reform draconian drug laws that systematically targeted poor people of color.

It is as if Sessions’ Justice Department is operating on a set of alternative facts. Because the statistics are well known: Whites and blacks use and sell drugs at roughly the same rates, and African Americans make up roughly 13 percent of the U.S. population. Yet law enforcement records are remarkably different for each demographic. According to Human Rights Watch: "Black adults are more than two-and-a-half times as likely as white adults to be arrested for drug possession. In 2014, Black adults accounted for just 14 percent of those who used drugs in the previous year but close to a third of those arrested for drug possession." In many states, a felony conviction also means losing the right to vote.