Mandatory retirement

felonies and serious misdemeanors. These Guidelines do not apply to less serious misdemeanor crimes. The United States Sentencing Commission was created by the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 and created these guidelines. In the beginning they were mandatory and very strict. People kept calling for longer, harsher sentences (Marvell 1995 p. 696). Congress enacted the Sentence Reform Act to satisfy…

Mandatory Minimums: The Importance of Discretion in Sentencing In 2013, Florida local John Horner’s friend asked to buy some of the former’s medication, prescribed to treat an eye injury in 2000. Horner agreed, later discovering his friend was a police informant and himself thrown behind bars. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison. (Flatow, 2013) It didn’t matter that his case was a textbook example of police entrapment; that he had no previous criminal record; that he was a steadily employed…

The research attempts to ascertain the impact that mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines have had on the criminal justice system as a whole in the United States. With its advent, mandatory minimum sentences have arguably had an economic impact on the justice system, particularly in corrections systems. Due to the fact that there are now more people being incarcerated for longer periods because of these sentencing guidelines, prisons are bearing an increasing cost for housing these inmates.…

suggestions should be based on data rather than emotional uproars. Public policies that are an end result of emotion rather than research have contributed enormously to mass incarceration in the United States. As per Beckett and Sasson (2000), mandatory minimums and the three strikes laws have…

The United States has an incarceration rate of 751 people per 100,000 while Afghanistan has only 76 per 100,000. You’d think only the United States has a flawed prison system by those numbers and news reports make it seem like they have the absolute worst flaws. On the contrary, both do have their fair share of problems ranging in severity. They also share problems that seem to be inevitable for a prison system. The U.S. is slowly fixing problems in their system and ironically has helped to fix…

substance abuse to aggression. Since the 1970s, policy makers have shifted to a crime control model that has “cracked down on crime” and focuses on punishment as a form of prevention. This goal has been accomplished by lengthening prison sentences, mandatory minimum sentencing laws, and practically eliminating privileges in prisons with the No Frills Prison…

controversial Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 introduced mandatory minimum sentencing for drug possession and distribution (Alexander, 2010). Controversy did not rise from the idea of mandatory minimum sentencing, but rather the obvious racial bias which arose from the disparities between sentencing for cocaine and crack. This legislation created a five-year mandatory minimum for possession of five grams of crack cocaine, yet to receive that same five-year mandatory sentence, the law required five…

In the United States, the use of mandatory minimums became commonplace with support from both sides of the political spectrum. With public support for tough laws, these sentencing minimums were enacted across the country due to increasing crime rates. However, in certain states, lawmakers and taxpayers are beginning to see that these laws cost more than they help. In Tallahassee, Florida, a twenty-five-year drug sentence for selling thirty-five pills for $300 will cost taxpayers an average of…

laws legalizing marijuana are Unconstitutional. Obama administration’s decision not to enforce the federal law banning marijuana in states that have legalized the drug is an abuse of prosecution discretion. In the judiciary branch there must be a mandatory sentencing. Even for the minimum charge that person must do some sort of time or punishment to pay their debt to society. The acts made a first time cannabis possession offense a minimum of two to ten years with a fine up to twenty thousand…

alternatives to long sentencing include drug treatment programs, ending mandatory…