Congress and the Department of Justice have continually ignored the facts presented to them by both government and non-partisan groups that show mandatory minimums are tremendously unfair. In fact Supreme Court Justice Kennedy and Chief Justice Rehnquist have both spoken out against mandatory minimums and yet a bill creating new tougher minimums is likely to be passed by the end of May 2005.
What minimums have done is taken reason and discretion out of the hands of judges and given extreme punishments to nonviolent offenders that exceed the punishment of most violent criminals. The number of people in prison since the advent of mandatory minimums doubled in the 80's and 90's and is likely to do so again this decade where we have seen the prison population soar over 2 million. This has left our prison system overburdened and spending 10's of Billions per year just to house these millions. The minimums are blatantly racist, for example over 80% of crack cocaine users are African American while about 80% of powder cocaine users are white, and while both drugs are the same substance crack is the only drug to have a mandatory minimum for possession (a 5 year minimum against a 1 year maximum for powder cocaine possession). And the minimums for selling apply a 100:1 ratio, meaning that the punishment for selling 5g of crack is the same for 500g of powder. The average sentence length for crack cocaine is 119.5 months compared to those convicted of robbery who serve an average 108 months; arson, 68 months; sexual abuse, 65 months; and manslaughter, 25 months (only murder and kidnapping are higher, powder is 77 months).
African Americans make up approximately 12 percent of the population and are 13 percent of the drug users, yet they constitute 38 percent of all drug arrests and 59 percent of those convicted of drug offenses. One in 20 African American men over the age of 18 is in state or federal prison, compared to one in 180 white men. Two-thirds of the 2 million Americans in jail are African American or Hispanic. These discrepancies are present in spite of the fact that drug use is not higher in minorities than it is among whites.
Repealing mandatory minimums is a necessary step to remove racism from America’s laws. |
