Last week, the attorney general demanded that judges enforce mandatory minimum sentencing, a policy that has unfairly lead to the increased incarceration of countless minorities. Under President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder had given guidelines to U.S. Attorneys, advising them to seek shorter sentences for non-violent drug offenders. With the attorney general’s new policy, countless lives will be ruined.
A third of African American Males are prohibited from voting due to the war on drugs. Nonviolent users, targeted for arrest by police and given harsh convictions, will have their lives destroyed by these cruel and unjust policies.
Because of the ease of Urban Arrests, police often target minority communities, simply under the pressure to fulfill arrest quotas. White youth, by contrast, make more successful plea bargains than Blacks and Latinos, an unfair imbalance in the scales of justice that these new policies will only exacerbate.
Instead of letting judges handle sentencing on a case-by-case basis, judges will be forced to throw the book at every non-violent offenders. Our prison population, larger than any nation in the world, has increased by 700% since the 1980’s, costing American tax payers over $100 billion dollars per year. Nine out of 10 prison inmates have committed non-violent drug offenses.