Mandatory Minimum Sentence and its Impacts on Crime Management

Mandatory Minimum Sentence and its Impacts on Crime Management
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Mandatory Minimum Sentence and its Impacts on Crime Management
Introduction
Criminal sentences with minimum penalties set by statutory law are commonplace in various legal jurisdictions in the US, even though their impacts have been questioned.   Minimum penalties may apply to certain offenses, individual offenders, or specific combinations of offense and offender traits. Although state-specific and crime-specific obligatory minimum sentences differ, they often ask for the offender to serve a minimum amount of time in jail. While some required minimum sentences, including five years for gun possession, pertain to specific offending behaviors, others—such as “habitual offender laws” foster only particular groups of repeat offenders. Common examples of habitual offender laws are “three-strikes laws,” which normally call for a penalty of twenty-five years to life for a third violent crime. Part of the challenge in implementing the mandatory minimum sentence is that it can lead to punishments that extend beyond what a criminal activity warrants. The criminal justice system is structured to rehabilitate rather than punish, something that a mandatory minimum sentence has been cited for violating. This study will focus on assessing the impacts of mandatory minimum sentences on crime management with an emphasis on juveniles. The findings of the study will expose the strengths and weaknesses of mandatory minimum sentences. Having an insightful understanding of the mandatory minimum sentence on crime management should help with crime management in terms of how such a policy should be structured, changed, or eliminated to achieve the basic prescription of the criminal justice system, which is to rehabilitate.
Background of the Study
The mandatory minimum sentence has attracted analyses from multiple stakeholders in the recent past. The United States Sentencing Commission received information on 13,604 offenders who were found guilty of crimes carrying mandatory minimum sentences during the 2016 fiscal year (Foo, 2022). 13.4% of all federal offenders, or over 60% (61.3%) of those convicted of a crime with a mandatory minimum sentence, did not secure remission from the sentence and were consequently still subject to it at sentencing. In the same period, 13.4% of all federal offenders, or 61.3% of those convicted of a mandatory minimum offense but not exempted from the obligatory minimum punishment, were sentenced to the mandatory minimum. At sentencing, defendants who still had to pay a mandatory minimum penalty received sentences that were, on average, 138 months long. This is more than twice as long as the sentences of those who were exempt from the requirement (67 months). For those who were not found guilty of crimes requiring a minimum punishment, the typical sentence was 28 months. Children have not been excluded from the impacts of the mandatory minimum sentence. Currently, 12,000 people are serving time (life sentence) in US prisons due to crimes they committed before they were 18. With the existence of mandatory minimum sentence that covers childre...