My first Magazine Final Draft Multimodal Project 4 | Page 11

being held in state and federal prisons today, largely a consequence of the various legislation en-
acted during the War on Drugs.
America’s judicial system severely punishes drug crimes without considering the individ-
ual. Allegedly enacted in an effort to eliminate racial and socioeconomic bias with regards to
sentencing, the Committee and Sentencing Reform Act of the 1980’s has resulted in the exponen-
tial growth of poor black criminals and many impoverished whites as well. Federal Judge Mark
Burnett refers to these people as the “the low-hanging fruit of the drug war” and astonishingly
claims that “more than 80 percent of the 4,546 meth defendants sentenced in federal courts in
2010 received a mandatory minimum sentence” (413). Burnett asserts that there is a lack of evi-
dence proving the effectiveness of minimum mandatory sentences and urges the public to raise
concerns over this flawed legislation that has been law for more than 30 years. Echoing his sen-
timents, Eric Sevigny condemns “excessive uniformity in sentencing” declaring that our prisons
are overrun because “varying degrees of culpability receive similar sentences based almost ex-
clusively on the quantity of a drug they possess” (309). Sevigny points out that judges have ef-
fectively lost their autonomy with regards to sentencing, stating that “judges lack the ability to
intervene and lower sentences more than 25% of a ridiculous sentence” (311). Sevigny concludes
that “disallowing more nuanced culpability distinctions, the sentencing guidelines and mandatory
minimums effectively “mandate uniformity” for offenders of widely varying roles and responsi-
bility in the drug trade” (311). America’s prisons are overflowing because judges have lost the
ability to interject common sense into a system that was designed to punish and deter what was
erroneously perceived as the cause of violent crime.