Leadership Quote by Jeff Sessions

Sessions is trying to smuggle a political choice into the language of inevitability. “You pay a price” frames an objective sentencing system not as a moral advance or a guardrail against bias, but as a costly indulgence. The phrase is deliberately vague: price for whom, paid in what currency, and collected by which victims? That ambiguity does the work. It invites listeners to fill in the blank with a familiar fear: judges’ hands tied, dangerous people released, communities at risk. “Objective” becomes a euphemism for constraints on discretion, and discretion, in tough-on-crime politics, is code for the power to ratchet punishment upward.

The follow-up, “That is, nothing is perfect,” is a classic rhetorical escape hatch. It sounds humble, even pragmatic, while deflecting from the actual tradeoff being debated: predictability and reduced disparity versus individualized judgment that can also reproduce prejudice. By conceding imperfection in the abstract, Sessions avoids naming the specific imperfection critics typically point to in discretionary sentencing: unequal outcomes by race, class, and geography. He shifts the audience’s attention from the documented costs of subjectivity to the imagined costs of uniformity.

Context matters: Sessions came of age in the late-20th-century law-and-order consensus and, as Attorney General, pushed for harsher charging and sentencing practices. Read that way, the line isn’t philosophical. It’s a pressure campaign against reforms like sentencing guidelines or mandatory minimum recalibration, positioning “objectivity” as naivete and severity as realism. The subtext: fairness is fine, but control and punishment are the priorities, and any constraint on them is a “price.”