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Effectiveness of mandatory minimum sentences
Mandatory minimum sentencing issues
Mandatory minimum sentencing issues
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Our U.S. justice system has undergone adjustments over the history of the United States. The court system has adapted over time to meet the changing needs of our society. From significant cases such as Brown vs. The Board of Education of Topeka, and the Deepwater Horizon Litigation. Even Though our justice system has been reconstructed many times, it still contains a flaw within the policies of our courts for mandatory minimum sentencing. This flaw is in significant need of a remedy for injustices it causes to those facing these sentences. Mandatory minimum sentencing is defined by the Federal mandatory minimum sentencing statutes as the limiting of the discretion of a court to impose a sentence that does not include a term of imprisonment or the death penalty. In common terms it is defined as the minimum time that must be prescribed as punishment to an offender, depending on the crime (Families Against Mandatory Minimums 1). …show more content…
The number of incarcerated citizens has risen from around 330,000 in 1980 to nearly 2,000,000 today (Bureau of Justice Statistics Bulletin, Prisoners of 1990s). The United States has less than 5% of the world’s population, yet the U.S. has around 25% of the population of incarcerated persons (NAACP 1). This has led to an unnecessary overcrowding of our nation’s state and federal prisons. The Vera Institute of Justice has released a study that found the aggregate cost of prisons in 2010 in the 40 states that had participated in the study was around $39 billion dollars; each incarcerated citizen costs each taxpayers nearly $31,286 per inmate (Vera Institute of Justice
The senseless and irrational analysis behind these mandatory minimum sentencing laws that left judges with no choice but to hand out deva...
The United States has a larger percent of its population incarcerated than any other country. America is responsible for a quarter of the world’s inmates, and its incarceration rate is growing exponentially. The expense generated by these overcrowded prisons cost the country a substantial amount of money every year. While people are incarcerated for a number of reasons, the country’s prisons are focused on punishment rather than reform, and the result is a misguided system that fails to rehabilitate criminals or discourage crime. The ineffectiveness of the United States’ criminal justice system is caused by mass incarceration of non-violent offenders, racial profiling, and a high rate of recidivism.
The criminal justice system has been in place the United States for centuries. The system has endured many changes throughout the ages. The need for a checks and balances system has been a priority for just as long. Federal sentencing guidelines were created to help create equal punishments among offenders. Judges are given the power of sentencing and they are not immune to opinions, bias, and feelings. These guidelines are set in place to allow the judge to keep their power but keep them within a control group of equality. Although there are a lot of pros to sentencing guidelines there are also a lot of cons. Research has shown that sentencing guidelines have allowed the power to shift from judges to prosecutors and led to sentencing disparity based on sex, race, and social class.
The gun mandatory minimum sentences potentially violate the Eighth Amendment that seeks to prohibit against cruel and unusual punishments such as the one in Weldon Angelos case. The mandatory minimum is a determinate sentencing where offenders are given a fixed term, the legislature fixes the penalty for offense categories and once a sanction is chosen and imposed it not subjected to change (Peak, 2013, p. 263). The judge in the Weldon case was bound by the minimum sentencing requirements which took the discretion to tailor a more fitting sentence for the first time drug offender.
The proliferation of prison overcrowding has been a rising concern for the U.S. The growing prison population poses considerable health and safety risks to prison staffs and employees, as well as to inmates themselves. The risks will continue to increase if no immediate actions are taken. Whereas fighting proliferation is fundamentally the duty of the U.S. government, prison overcrowding has exposed that the U.S. government will need to take measures to combat the flaws in the prison and criminal justice system. Restructuring the government to combat the danger of prison overcrowding, specifically in California, thus requires reforms that reestablishes the penal codes, increases the state’s budget, and develops opportunities for paroles to prevent their return to prison. The following context will examine and discuss the different approaches to reduce the population of state prisons in California in order to avoid prison overcrowding.
Over the past several decades, the number of prison inmates has grown exponentially. In 1980, prison population had numbers around half a million inmates. A graph of statistics gathered from the U.S. Bureau of Justice shows that between 1980 and 2010, the prison population grew almost five times, topping out at nearly 2.5 million. According to an article in The New York Times, the average time spent in jail by prisoners released in 2009 increased by 36% compared to prisoners released in 1990. Many people, such as those at Human Rights Watch, believe that the increase of these numbers has been because of tough-on-crime laws, causing prisons to be filled with non-violent offenders. This rise in crime rates, prison population, and recidivism, has led politicians as well as ordinary citizens to call for prison reform.
Today, half of state prisoners are serving time for nonviolent crimes. Over half of federal prisoners are serving time for drug crimes. Mass incarceration seems to be extremely expensive and a waste of money. It is believed to be a massive failure. Increased punishments and jailing have been declining in effectiveness for more than thirty years. Violent crime rates fell by more than fifty percent between 1991 and 2013, while property crime declined by forty-six percent, according to FBI statistics. Yet between 1990 and 2009, the prison population in the U.S. more than doubled, jumping from 771,243 to over 1.6 million (Nadia Prupis, 2015). While jailing may have at first had a positive result on the crime rate, it has reached a point of being less and less worth all the effort. Income growth and an aging population each had a greater effect on the decline in national crime rates than jailing. Mass incarceration and tough-on-crime policies have had huge social and money-related consequences--from its eighty billion dollars per-year price tag to its many societal costs, including an increased risk of recidivism due to barbarous conditions in prison and a lack of after-release reintegration opportunities. The government needs to rethink their strategy and their policies that are bad
Sentencing refers to the imposition of a criminal sanction by a judicial authority. Our society looks to sentencing to achieve an assortment of goals. A Legislator’s view point of these goals for punishment will affect their decisions of sentencing. The five goals that legislators consider are: retribution, incapacitation, deterrence, rehabilitation, and restoration. Each of these goals will be discussed and how they all correspond with each other in a sentencing of the death penalty.
To begin, Mandatory minimum sentences result in prison overcrowding, and based on several studies, it does not alleviate crime, for example crimes such as shoplifting or solicitation. These sentencing guidelines do not allow a judge to take into consideration the first time offender, differentiate the deviance level of the offender, and it does not allow for the judge to alter a punishment or judgment to each individual case. When mandatory sentencing came into effect, the drug lords they were trying to stop are not the ones being affected by the sentences. It is the nonviolent, low-level drug users who are overcrowding the prisons as a result of these sentences. Both the U.S. Sentencing Commission and the Department of Justice have determined that mandatory sentencing is not an effective way to deter crime. Studies show that mandatory minimums have gone downhill due to racial a...
According to statistics since the early 1970’s there has been a 500% increase in the number of people being incarcerated with an average total of 2.2 million people behind bars. The increase in rate of people being incarcerated has also brought about an increasingly disproportionate racial composition. The jails and prisons have a high rate of African Americans incarcerated with an average of 900,000 out of the 2.2 million incarcerateed being African American. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics 1 in 6 African American males has been incarcerated at some point in time as of the year 2001.
Overcrowding in our state and federal jails today has become a big issue. Back in the 20th century, prison rates in the U.S were fairly low. During the years later due to economic and political factors, that rate began to rise. According to the Bureau of justice statistics, the amount of people in prison went from 139 per 100,000 inmates to 502 per 100,000 inmates from 1980 to 2009. That is nearly 261%. Over 2.1 million Americans are incarcerated and 7.2 million are either incarcerated or under parole. According to these statistics, the U.S has 25% of the world’s prisoners. (Rick Wilson pg.1) Our prison systems simply have too many people. To try and help fix this problem, there needs to be shorter sentences for smaller crimes. Based on the many people in jail at the moment, funding for prison has dropped tremendously.
Not everyone loves the ideas of alternatives to prison because alternatives to prison seem to work only when there is a limited number of cases that adhere to the sentence, However, when places like California is spending more money on their prison systems than on actual education, alternatives to prison seem to be the best choice (David, 2006).
Trachtenberg, B. (2009, February). Incarceration policy strikes out: Exploding prison population compromises the U.S. justice system. ABA Journal, 66.
Mandatory minimums, harsh prison sentences imposed on offenders by law, where discretion is limited. Offenders, most of the time nonviolent, are faced with prison terms that are meant for a drug kingpin, not a low level first or second time offender. Mandatory minimums have been proven not to be the answer in our criminal justice system and need to be changed. Mandatory Minimums has created a problem within our society where we send everyone to prison and don 't present offenders with better opportunities. We have turned into a society focused on retribution and deterrence, and have forgotten about rehabilitation.
Provide the justifications for punishment in modern society. Punishment functions as a form of social control and is geared towards “imposing some unwanted burden such as fines, probations, imprisonment, or even death” on a convicted person in return for the crimes they committed (Stohr, Walsh, & Hemmens, 2013, p.6). There are four main justifications for punishment and they are: retribution, deterrence, rehabilitation, and incapacitation. There is also said to be a fifth justification of reintegration as well.