In some countries, incarceration is a last step, not a first one. When people are locked up, it's generally because a number of other initiatives have been tried first -- and didn't work. Not so in the US. Prison sentences are what's being offered. Because, while there are a few promising pilot programs being run to demonstrate alternatives to prison, there are virtually no nationally available programs that are in sync with mandatory minimum sentencing to help the courts and the convicts to avoid wasting needless years in "the joint."
Judge Bennett writes that he has sentenced more than 3,000 defendants in four federal district courts and reviewed sentences...Far from being a bucolic area, he writes, he sentences "more drug offenders in a single year than the average federal district court judge in New York City, Washington, Chicago, Minneapolis and San Francisco--combined."
He says, "While drug cases nationally make up 29 percent of federal judges' criminal dockets, according to the US Sentencing Commission, they make up more than 56 percent of mine. More startling, while meth cases make up 18 percent of a judge's drug docket nationally, they account for 78 percent of mine. Add crack cocaine and together they account for 87 percent."
Judge Bennett writes about crack defendants. He says, "They are almost always poor African-Americans. Meth defendants are generally lower-income whites. More than 80 percent of the 4,546 meth defendants sentenced in federal courts in 2010 received a mandatory minimum sentence. These small-time addicts are apprehended not through high-tech wiretaps or sophisticated undercover stings but by common traffic stops for things like nonfunctioning taillights."
He adds: "Or they're caught in a search of the logs at a local Walmart to see who is buying unusually large amounts of nonprescription cold medicine. They are the low-hanging fruit of the drug war. Other than their crippling meth addiction, they are very much like the folks I grew up with. Virtually all are charged with federal drug trafficking conspiracies--which sounds ominous but is based on something as simple as two people agreeing to purchase pseudoephedrine and cook it into meth. They don't even have to succeed."
Why do we have federal mandatory minimum sentences? The enabling legislation is the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984. The Guidelines are the product of the United States Sentencing Commission, which reports to Congress annually. Their primary goal was to alleviate sentencing disparities that research had indicated was prevalent in the existing sentencing system.
The Sentencing Commission' s future life is in the hands of Congress, which votes the funds for its work. For a number of years, there have been concerted efforts to persuade the Sentencing Commission to recommend to Congress an end to minimum sentencing. But the Commission -- which is said to be good at vote-counting -- has elected to nibble around the edges.
Few members of Congress appear to be prepared to question the effectiveness of mandatory minimum/maximum sentences. Many members fear primary challenges from rightwing candidates who are eager to accuse incumbents of being "soft on crime." That attitude is largely responsible for the overly cautious approaches by Congress.
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