Essay On Mandatory Minimum Sentencing

Through the year’s mandatory minimum sentences seemed like the way to go, nonviolent drug offenders made to serve a minimum term for the crimes they committed. Where the phrase “if you do the crime, you do the time” held a lot of truth and the “war on drugs” was just the beginning. But what if it is not so true anymore? What if I told you we have lost the war on drugs? And, what if mandatory minimums were responsible for some of the problems with in our criminal justice system? What was once put in place to keep crime off the streets and the public safe, is now crippling the system with massive overcrowding and a whole lot of debt. This once flourishing system is failing at its current state and changes need to start within to fix it. This …show more content…
That is when Congress decided to stepped in and removed much of that discretionary power after they began to pass law after law imposing mandatory minimum sentences. Congresses “tough on crime” stance, made it so the courts had no choice but to hand down long, arbitrary lengths of imprisonment. Vanita Gupta (Center for Justice) composed a piece in 2011 titled “Criminal Justice Reform 2011- The Good, the Bad, and the Work Ahead.” In this piece, she goes on to talk about the “Safe and Fair” campaign. This campaign was implemented by the American Civil Liberties Union, they made the “fight against overincarceration a top organizational priority.” In her opinion, “[i]t was the perfect time to do so: after decades of “tough on crime” policymaking, there is now an opening to shift to being smart on crime, and to make policy based on facts and evidence, rather than emotion and politics” (Gupta, 2011, p.1). Basically, some of the overcrowding issues are in large part due to Congress and their “tough on crime” stances. The power needs to be handed back to the