Official portrait of United States Attorney General Eric Holder (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By Brentin Mock

Well, the private prison industry won’t like this at all: Today, Attorney General Eric Holder will announce new policies that will reduce maximized sentences for nonviolent drug offenders who aren’t tied to gangs or large-scale drug organizations. Holder will also seek sentencing reductions for elderly, nonviolent inmates while seeking alternative ways to handle other nonviolent criminals besides sending them to prison.

Holder is expected to make these announcements, which he’s been hinting at for months, today at the national conference for the American Bar Association in San Francisco, according to The Washington Post.

“A vicious cycle of poverty, criminality and incarceration traps too many Americans and weakens too many communities; however, many aspects of our criminal justice system may actually exacerbate this problem rather than alleviate it,” Holder will say today, as written in excerpts of his speech obtained by the Post. “Too many Americans go to too many prisons for far too long and for no good law enforcement reason. “We cannot simply prosecute or incarcerate our way to becoming a safer nation.”

Read More  Holder: ‘We Can’t Incarcerate Our Way to Becoming a Safer Nation’ – COLORLINES.