Federal drug laws develop a labeling issue. When you hear the term "drug trafficker," you might consider Pablo Escobar or Walter White, but the truth is that under federal law, drug traffickers consist of people who purchase pseudo-ephedrine for their methamphetamine dealer; serve as intermediary in a series of small deals; or perhaps pick up a travel suitcase for the wrong pal. Thanks to conspiracy laws, everybody on the totem pole can be subject to the very same severe obligatory minimum sentences.
To the men and females who drafted our federal drug laws in 1986, this may come as a surprise. According to Sen. Robert Byrd, cosponsor of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, the factor to attach 5- and ten-year mandatory sentences to drug trafficking was to punish "the kingpins-- the masterminds who are actually running these operations", and the mid-level dealers.
Fast forward twenty-five years. Today, practically everybody convicted of a federal drug criminal offense is founded guilty of "drug trafficking", which most of the time leads to at least a five- or ten-year necessary prison sentence. That's a lot of time in federal jail for many people who are minor parts of drug trade, the large bulk of whom are men and women of color.
This is the system that federal district Judge Mark Bennett sees every day. Judge Bennett rests on the district court in northern Iowa, and he deals with a great deal of drug cases. "Never could I have actually imagined," he writes in a recent piece in The Country, "that ... after nineteen years [as a federal district court judge], I would have sent out 1,092 of my fellow citizens to federal prison for necessary minimum sentences varying from sixty months to life without the possibility of release. The majority of these ladies, males and young adults are nonviolent addict." What about the kingpins? "I can count them on one hand," he states.
The numbers can't convey the ridiculous tragedy of everything. This is how he explains a current drug trafficking case:
I just recently sentenced a group of more than twenty defendants on meth trafficking conspiracy charges. Eighteen were 'pill smurfers,' as federal district attorneys put it, suggesting their role amounted to frequently buying and delivering cold medicine to meth cookers in exchange for really little, low-grade quantities to feed their serious dependencies. All of them dealt with mandatory minimum sentences of sixty or 120 months.
There is data to recommend that Judge Bennett's experience is not uncharacteristic. In 2007, the U.S. Sentencing Commission put together significant information on drug and fracture sentencing. They discovered that in 2005, most of the lowest-level drug- and crack-trafficking offenders-- males and females described as "street-level dealers", "couriers/mules", and "renter/loader/lookout/ enabler/users"-- received five- or ten-year obligatory prison sentences. This is particularly real for crack-cocaine accused, the majority of whom are black; in spite of the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, offering a small quantity of fracture drug (28 grams) brings the very same mandatory minimum sentence-- five years-- as offering 500 grams of powder drug.
This is the reality for which proponents of severe federal drug laws must account. We can not pretend that heavy sentences for women like Kemba Smith and men like Jamel Dossie are the fluke errors of overboard laws. We need to confess that our sentencing of small participants in the drug trade to prison terms suggested for the leaders of big drug companies-- as a typical incident, not as an exception. As a result, we unnecessarily lock up lots of minor culprits for long periods. Judge Bennett decries the human costs of these sentences:
If lengthy compulsory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug addicts in fact worked, one may be able to justify them. I have seen how they leave hundreds of thousands of young children parent less and thousands of aging, infirm and dying parents childless.
Here, again, we have evidence that Judge Bennett is ideal: long necessary sentences are unneeded for many drug culprits. In 2002 and 2003, Michigan and New York repealed compulsory sentences for drug transgressors and provided judges the power to impose shorter sentences, probation, or drug treatment.
For decades, Judge Bennett has actually seen a system that does not make sense. He has seen mandatory laws composed for the most major, large-scale drug dealers applied to the men look at this and women on the lowest rungs of the drug trade, and he has actually seen it occur a lot. We when pictured that severe compulsory sentences would be utilized to deal with the leaders of large drug operations. It's time our federal drug laws were fit to the people that they actually target.
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