Mandatory sentencing

Sheet, 2016). Roughly 2.3 million people are incarcerated causing North America to hold roughly 25% of the world’s prisoners. President Obama and his administration for two terms have tried to address this growing incarceration through the Fair Sentencing Act. In 2015, President Obama commuted the sentences of 46 inmates who were serving time in prison for non-violent drug offenses, according to The Economist (The Economist, 2016). Recently, in 2016, President Obama has shifted his focus to…

prison is to prevent or deter future crimes, so maybe mandatory minimums are worth the extra cost. However, Professor Alfred Blumstein has written, "Lock up a rapist, and there is one less rapist on the street. Lock up a drug dealer, and you've created an employment opportunity for someone else" (Cassell 1042). Mandatory minimum sentencing laws are clearly not a deterrent to drug crimes, and that makes perfect…

Mandatory sentencing has resulted in a more than 400 percent increase in the number of women in prison, and has led to higher sentence for African Americans than for whites. In an interview on National Public Radio, Criminal Justice Policy Foundation President Eric Sterling said that mandatory sentencing has “overwhelmingly been targeted at people of color and at low-level offenders. “Mandatory sentencing, say those who support drug legalization, exhausts…

of imprisonment is aided by criminal racial disparities, mandatory sentencing which play a mitigating factor in the rise of the prison population and the war on drugs which is a very crucial driver of mass…

Harsh minimum sentencing practices around drug offences exist because of the Reagan administration’s rhetoric that blamed drugs as the primary cause of violent crime in the US during the 1980s. Prior to Reagan’s “War on Drugs” era, drug crime in the US was relatively minor, however, beginning in 1980, the number of prisoners in jail for drug related offences skyrocketed. While there were just 41,100 of these prisoners in 1980, by 2010 that number had tripled, an increase of 1,100%. One of the…

Act was established, which set more mandatory minimum guidelines, including for crack and powder cocaine (Burrington, 2017, lecture 5, slide 6). Come to find out, crack is virtually the same as the powder cocaine. Crack is derived from powder cocaine. Studies show that Physiological and psychotropic effects are identical, Substances are pharmacologically identical and effects on brain chemistry are identical (Coyle, 2002, p. 2). The mandatory minimum drug sentencing was supposed to have the…

Juveniles in confinement are declining but the reasons are elusive ( NCJJ Report). There are several prospective trends in correctional facilities dealing with improving community supervision and racial disparities in the criminal justice system (Trends in U.S. Corrections). The American criminal justice system encounter the decline of juveniles being incarcerated due to certain diversion programs (NCJJ). Diversion tactics such as boot camps and community/court based diversion programs help…

rehabilitation, this type of sentencing model channels the underlying causes of crime in order to reduce future offending (Worrall, 2015). In colonial times, sentencing was solely on retributive and later on deterrence. However in the late 1800's, sentencing became premised on rehabilitation. This then led to a system of punishment called indeterminate sentencing. Sentencing often had wide ranges involving minimum and maximum terms that could sentence someone as little as a day to life in prison…

or turn in dirty urine samples” (Clear 174). This would give people who will most likely go back to prison an incentive to not do drugs. The authors then begin to discuss three items that could eventually reduce mass incarceration, “...repealing mandatory penalties...reducing length of stay, and...reducing rates of recidivism” (clear 163). In the previous paragraph the authors talked about one way to reduce recidivism rates and that would be rehabilitation.…

The relationship between race and crime and its impact on decisions in the criminal justice system is a topic of controversy in both public and academic spheres. The imprisonment of ethnic minorities at a higher rate than their White counterpart occurs in most western nation (La Prairie, 1999; Tonry, 1995, 1997). In Canada, the overly represented groups are Aboriginals (First Nations, Inuit, and Metis) and Black Canadians relative to their incidence in the general population (Roberts & Stenning,…