WTFH – Mandatory Prison Terms

Should laws regarding mandatory prison terms be changed?

Publish by the Washington Post at 9:30 a.m. on August 12, 2013:

“The Justice Department plans to change how it prosecutes some non-violent drug offenders, so they would no longer face mandatory minimum prison sentences, in an overhaul of federal prison policy that Attorney General Eric Holder will unveil in August 2013.

Holder will outline the status of a broad, ongoing project intended to improve Justice Department sentencing policies across the country in a speech to the American Bar Association in San Francisco.  “I have mandated a modification of the Justice Department’s charging policies so that certain low-level, nonviolent drug offenders who have no ties to large-scale organizations, gangs, or cartels, will no longer be charged with offenses that impose draconian mandatory minimum sentences,” Holder is expected to say, at an annual meeting of the American Bar Association, held in San Francisco, California. The United States imprisons a higher percentage of its population than other large countries, largely because of anti-drug laws passed in the 1980s and 1990s…”

Seventy percent (70%) of America’s prison population is made up of black men serving mandatory prison terms concerning non-violent drug related incidences.

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