John N. Mitchell, known for his participation in the “Committee for the Reelection of President Nixon,” was Attorney General (AG) during the first term of the Nixon Administration. During his tenure as AG, his most impactful policy changes were all along the line of “crime reform.” In a speech for the The Conference on Crime and the Urban Crisis of the National Emergency Committee of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, Mitchell outlines his opinions on crime in the country. All of Mitchell’s opinions follow the notion that drugs are the root cause of crime, and crime is committed by minorities in inner cities. These ideals led to his policies to move farther from “crime reform” and closer to what would later be called the War on Drugs.

The War on Drugs not only brought the current state mass incarceration for minorities present in today’s justice system, but also used trillions of government dollars for virtually no decline in nationwide drug use. To this day, laws created in the name of “crime reform” still plague our justice system.

The current Attorney General Jeff Sessions has similar opinions on the presence of drugs in America, all while indicating his department will stop monitoring those who administer drug checks. Sessions’s leadership of the justice department is currently in a “Nixon era” direction, much like the rest of the administration, but this is particularly significant.

Sessions has been using the same rhetoric previously used by Mitchell, such as only highlighting crime from inner cities and citing false rises in violent crime. Rhetoric such as this is used to diminish public outrage over the impact of their policies. Mitchell and Sessions also both advocate for the use of “stop-and-frisk,” civil forfeiture and sending federal troops to America’s inner cities — all in the name of “crime reform.”

Barack Obama tried to heal some of the wounds brought by the war on drugs, most notably signing the Fair Sentencing Act, which reduced the disparity in crack cocaine sentencing. However, there is still a small disparity allowing drug laws to unfairly target poor drug users as opposed to wealthy ones.

John N. Mitchell and Jeff Sessions are two men who were given the opportunity to head the United States Justice Department as the Attorney General respectively, and both have similar perspectives on crime in America. The one large difference is what they did or will do with that perspective. Mitchell was part of a group who led to cycle of incarceration in the country’s inner cities and ultimately, the beginning of our broken criminal justice system. Sessions has not yet brought on anything similar to this and hopefully never will, but if he does not start to look towards “crime reform” in a different way, he may have a large part in blurring the lines between our current administration and the administration of Watergate.