More than 75 percent of Americans now support getting rid of mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent offenders, a new Reason-Rupe poll finds.
Eliminating mandatory minimum sentences would give judges the ability to make sentencing decisions on a case-by-case basis.
The federal government and several states have enacted mandatory minimum sentencing laws over the past few decades. The most common crime for them are drug offenses, Reason reports.
The big issue with mandatory minimums is that judges don’t have any control in making the punishment fit the crime, as the saying goes, leading to prosecutors having more control over the sentencing process through plea deals. And those deals have proved especially productive for prosecutors. An estimated 98.7 percent of offenders who were convicted of a federal drug offense pleaded guilty in fiscal year 2013 to avoid going to trial and having to face a mandatory minimum sentence, according to a report by the United States Sentencing Commission.
But now with prison populations exploding, largely due to mandatory minimums and the “War on Drugs,” advocates and some U.S. officials are looking toward options to help reduce this problem.
U.S. Senators Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Rand Paul (R- Ky.) have been the most outspoken politicians on this issue, introducing a bipartisan bill that could help stem the problem.
Exiting Attorney General Eric Holder has also spoken out against the mandatory minimum sentencing structure.
The Reason-Rupe poll finds that Americans of all stripes overwhelmingly support this kind of criminal justice reform.
Only 17 percent of Americans oppose the idea of eliminating mandatory minimum sentences. The poll also found that support for this idea has grown by 6 percentage points since Reason-Rupe asked this question in December 2013.
About 81 percent of Democrats, 75 percent of Independents, and 73 percent of Republicans support eliminating mandatory minimums in favor of judicial discretion. Different ethnic backgrounds also didn’t impact the results much. Seventy-seven percent of whites, 80 percent of African Americans, and 73 percent of Hispanics favored eliminating mandatory minimums.
“These results only demonstrate that Americans are overwhelmingly in favor of returning sentencing discretion to judges and do not indicate whether or not Americans support the type of lengthy prison terms mandatory minimum sentencing laws require for nonviolent offenders,” Reason reports. “But they at least make clear that public opinion no longer favors the status quo. Simply put, mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent offenders are becoming increasingly unpopular and harder to defend.”
