Arguments Against Mandatory Minimums

As noted, drug crimes have mostly disadvantaged minorities in inner-city communities. The mandatory minimums created a round-up effect that many believed to do with the decline in criminal rates since the early 1990s. However, this decline mirrors that of Canada, whose prison population was actually declining in comparison to the rise of incarceration in the United States (Smith, Goggin and Gendreau 2002).
This means then that a direct statement on the mandatory minimum sentencing cannot adequately explain the decline in criminal activity; causation does not equal correlation in this instance. Furthermore, “most optimistic research...on the crime decline of the 1990s finds that 25% of the decline in violent crime can be attributed to rising imprisonment” (Spelman 2000). However, in Bruce Western’s research, published in his novel, Punishment and Inequality in America, he derives that the rise in incarceration effects merely but, 10% of the decline in crime. Furthermore, these studies exclude other factors for the rise of incarceration, such as
For instance their studies have shown that although around 20,000 drug offenders have been sentenced to mandatory minimums in Massachusetts alone, rate of drug abuse and addiction has not declined. Their argument stands that if mandatory minimum sentences are repealed then that drug offenders should be sentenced like any other case in which someone breaks a law. A judge should look at the person’s criminal history, their involvement and severity of the crime committed, the danger that the person could be to society and if the person needs professional help, such as psychiatric care or drug treatments (FAMM). Mandatory minimums take the role a judge plays out of their