Despite widespread recognition that mandatory minimums is bad policy, the politics of being 'tough on crime' precludes a more rational approach to sentencing As a twenty-something federal prosecutor in Washington DC, during the crack epidemic in the late '80s, David M. Zlotnick realized that mandatory minimum sentences gave him more discretion than judges who had been on the bench for decades. Since the US attorney's office had the resources, it "prosecuted every five-gram crack-cocaine case." Zlotnick recalls how the poor black kids caught with these small quantities received "sentences of 10 to 15 years, as if they were kingpins of some sort, which seemed absurd to me.O Cases involving similar amounts of powder cocaine, which disproportionately involved white defendants, got far less scrutiny. [continues 3819 words]
Group Targets Cutting Abuse by Youth In On the Penitentiary System in the United States and Its Application in France, the work that originally brought Alexis de Tocqueville to America, he asks, "What is the principal object of punishment in relation to him who suffers it?" His answer: "It is to give him the habits of society, and first to teach him to obey." If this is the ethos of the American criminal justice system, it may explain why drug addicts are usually classified as criminals and put in prison until they can be expected to have acquired the habits of society and learned to obey. According to the Physician Leadership on National Drug Policy (PLNDP), it also betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the "personal nature of addiction" and highlights what has proven to be a misguided belief in the effectiveness of incarceration to reform drug addicts. [continues 411 words]
