In the United States, drug-related crimes are an epidemic on the population, with serious repercussions to the communities they affect most. With 1 person out of every 100 being in jail or prison, 80% of inmates abuse drugs with up to 80% of those inmates who abuse drugs committing a new drug-related crime when they are released into the community. (NADCP, 2014)
According to the Uniform Crime Reports, drug-related arrests have increased greatly from 580,900 in 1982 to approx. 1.8 million in 2007, with more than four-fifths of those arrests being for possession. Over the years, blacks have been found to be more than three times as likely to be arrested than whites for drug crimes in the U.S. and have been seen to be given longer sentences for those crimes. There are multiple causes leading to this imbalance in criminal justice, ranging from criminal justice policy making to socioeconomic disparities, but in recent years there have been efforts to create …show more content…
This meant that it would now take a much larger quantity of crack to receive a mandatory minimum and it eliminated the mandatory minimum for small possessions. Although the Fair Sentencing Act is not retroactive, it has helped to balance the scale with race and punishment since 2010, and has been a factor in addressing mass incarceration in the United States.
Mass incarceration went mostly unnoticed in the U.S. until 2011 when the U.S. Supreme Court delivered a decision in the Brown v. Plata case which required the state of California to reduce its prison population by roughly 46,000 inmates due to overcrowding. This level of overcrowding was not uncommon across the country due to the “revolving door” or recidivism -- the act of a person repeating a negative behavior after being punished or treated for it. This has been a large factor in dealing with drugs and crime over the year. (Harris,
According to the Uniform Crime Reports, drug-related arrests have increased greatly from 580,900 in 1982 to approx. 1.8 million in 2007, with more than four-fifths of those arrests being for possession. Over the years, blacks have been found to be more than three times as likely to be arrested than whites for drug crimes in the U.S. and have been seen to be given longer sentences for those crimes. There are multiple causes leading to this imbalance in criminal justice, ranging from criminal justice policy making to socioeconomic disparities, but in recent years there have been efforts to create …show more content…
This meant that it would now take a much larger quantity of crack to receive a mandatory minimum and it eliminated the mandatory minimum for small possessions. Although the Fair Sentencing Act is not retroactive, it has helped to balance the scale with race and punishment since 2010, and has been a factor in addressing mass incarceration in the United States.
Mass incarceration went mostly unnoticed in the U.S. until 2011 when the U.S. Supreme Court delivered a decision in the Brown v. Plata case which required the state of California to reduce its prison population by roughly 46,000 inmates due to overcrowding. This level of overcrowding was not uncommon across the country due to the “revolving door” or recidivism -- the act of a person repeating a negative behavior after being punished or treated for it. This has been a large factor in dealing with drugs and crime over the year. (Harris,