When Congress creates a crime, like drug trafficking, makes that a criminal offense, they have to
set a penalty.
And typically they'll set a ceiling for that penalty.
Uh, oftentimes with crimes, especially serious crimes, in addition to setting a ceiling,
they'll set a mandatory minimum, so that the judge's discretion is limited.
And the reason people think that is problematic is prosecutors through their charging decisions
can largely set the sentence for a particular defendant.
And people on the pro-reform side would say judges should deem the sentence.
Now, more importantly where the mandatory minimums that are currently being debated
came from, and this is important.
They really were, were passed in the mid-1980s and the history behind them is that from 1961
to 1985, violent crime had tripled.
Public was, was, was crying for a response.
And Congress, uh, responded by enacting certain laws from 1991 to, to 2014, violent crime
was cut in half, as we continued to put violent criminals and high-level drug traffickers
in prison.
Most criminologists say that the biggest driver for the crime rate is the state of the economy.
And the second thing is how policing has changed.
In the 1990s we put a lot more police on the ground, solving crimes.
And again, it's the certainty of getting caught and the certainty of the punishment that tends
to deter people from committing new crimes.
And so there are all these factors that go into why the crime rate is high or low.
But the length between that and incarceration rate is just not nearly as strong as we previously
thought.
Now the problem is, that as soon as we backed off these mandatory penalties and the enforcement
approach that we had taken during those years, in 2015, 2016 violent crime drastically switched
uh, direction.
And the violent crime wait- rate when up seven percent during those two years.
And homicide rate went up 20%.
You look at a country like Canada, whose crime rates have largely mirrored ours.
They've gone up, they've gone down.
But Canada has locked up a fraction of the number of its citizens versus the United States.
And so that has led many scholars to believe that, that it's not long-sentences and the
number of people we put in prison that drives the crime rate.
These mandatory minimums are uh, critical to federal prosecutors and their ability to
do their jobs.
Mandatory minimums allow federal prosecutors to dismantle, disrupt interstate and international
drug trafficking organizations.
And they do it because when they have a mandatory penalty, it puts a criminal defendant in a
position of either cooperating or facing substantial terms of imprisonment.
What ends up happening is people who are either innocent or have a triable case, do not feel
like they can exercise their constitutional right to a jury trial because if you're offered
a three-year plea deal, but if you go to trial and there's a trial penalty of a 30 year mandatory
minimum, who realistically, even if you're innocent is going to risk those chances of
potentially going away for prison for the bulk of your adult life.
The United States has five percent of the world's population but 25% of the world's
prisoners.
And we incarcerate our citizens at a greater rate than almost any other country on the
planet.
And mandatory minimums have been a part of that.
Escalation of the use of incarceration.
The suggestion that we have an incarceration problem is misplaced.
We have a crime problem and it, and I would encourage people who think that we have an
incarceration problem to instead focus their, their efforts on uh, front-end uh, efforts
to uh, prevent crime, prevent criminals from engaging in this, these very serious crimes.