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Invisiblejohnm214
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Crack Sentencing Reform Hysteria... Oh Noes, those bad men will be released says Att. General
    #7997372 - 02/08/08 06:05 PM (15 years, 11 months ago)

So apparently doing years for possesion of some crystals isn't enough, now people are bitching about correcting the wrong of the crack/cocaine disparity.


From teh drug war rant:
http://blogs.salon.com/0002762/

Quote:

Bolt the doors, Ethel, the Prison Crack Gangs are loose!

Our Attorney General pulls out the FEAR card again.

In a statement prepared for his scheduled appearance before the House Judiciary Committee today, Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey said that unless Congress acts, "1,600 convicted crack dealers, many of them violent gang members, will be eligible for immediate release into communities nationwide" under a decision by the U.S. Sentencing Commission.

"Retroactive application of these new lower guidelines will pose significant public safety risks . . ." Mukasey said in the statement. "Many of these offenders are among the most serious and violent offenders in the federal system and their early release . . . would produce tragic, but predictable results."

Malakkar Vohryzek does a good job of putting Mukasey in his place. Vohryzek does it by using things like facts.

First off, no one is addressing the truth that I've experienced first hand, being a former federal prisoner: most of the "gang member" crack dealers are profiled as gang members. Just as I was listed as a "Drug Kingpin" due to the weight of the paper involved in my case (not the actual LSD amount), most young black men convicted of crack offenses are called "gang members" based on little more than speculation.

They certainly aren't convicted of being gang members. A tattoo of a girlfriend's name becomes a gang affiliation mark. A scar from a bullet wound. Clothing worn when arrested. There are endless facts that can be taken out of context, and used to assert a gang membership, even when this is patently false. I did five years with a man out of Compton. He had no gang affiliation whatsoever. Yet he was listed as a blood, because the snitch in his case was affiliated with the Bloods, and if he was supplying a gang member affiliate, clearly it was because he was in the gang himself.

And yes, this epidemic of violent crack dealers? Let me look at my area -- Bloomington-Normal, Illinois -- a booming twin cities with two universities, major industry, several police departments, and over 200 police officers. Based on population averages, we should be prepared to expect an onslaught of... almost one crack dealer. That is, assuming that a Judge approves the release even after Justice Department efforts to prevent it. And this crack dealer will already have served significantly more time than an equivalent powder cocaine dealer.

It would be nice to have an Attorney General who would come out and say:

"This is an overdue correction to a bad law, and I'm instructing the Justice Department to work with the Judiciary to expedite the identification and release of eligible non-violent offenders to be reunited with their families. As an additional benefit, this initial release could save us up to $40 million per year in prison costs."

Well, I can dream, can't I?






what say you?

I think incarcerating people for drugs is stupid anyways, but bitching about people being let out when the law is obviously wrong- dumb.

If these people were such violent thugs, they would have concurrent sentences for those crimes. This reduction won't do shit to those concurrent sentences. So someone sentenced for drug possesion and assault won't have the assault sentence affected, they'll still do their time.

Same old shit: but drug users/dealers are violent! No thugs are violent, and more thugs use drugs. I've no problem with locking up violent assholes, so lets get to it, but how will legalising or lessining drug penalties affect these violent folks? If its their charecter it won't, and so we'll still have cause to imprison them irrespective of drug law reform. So why the fuss? No one is saying someone amped on crack shouldn't be in jail when they flip out and stab someone, but stabbing someone isn't caused by crack, its caused by a shitty person or a volatile situation. When these thugs assault someone, we'll throw em away.

Leave the peacful possesers, dealers, and manufacturers alone though.


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OfflineAlan RockefellerM
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Re: Crack Sentencing Reform Hysteria... Oh Noes, those bad men will be released says Att. General [Re: johnm214]
    #7997497 - 02/08/08 06:35 PM (15 years, 11 months ago)

From last week's Drug War Chronicle:


Summary: The evil US attorney general Mukasey seems unlikely to get his wish.


Sentencing: US Attorney General Raises Specter of Violent
Crime Jump If Crack Prisoners Released, Warns He Could Try to
Block It
http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/521/attorney_general_mukasey_crack_early_release

Twice in two days last week, US Attorney General Robert Mukasey
lashed out at the US Sentencing Commission's December decision
to apply cuts in federal crack sentences to prisoners currently
behind bars, warning last Thursday that they could spark an
increase in violent crime and suggesting the following day he
may try to block the releases.

The Sentencing Commission decision brought a small measure of
justice to some 19,500 federal prisoners, about 85% of whom are
black, who were sentenced under harsh federal crack laws. Some
2,500 of them will be able to start applying for sentence
reductions in March, a process that will undoubtedly drag out
for months and not automatically result in reductions for
everybody.

Still, speaking before the US Conference of Mayors last
Thursday, Mukasey warned that some 1,600 convicted crack
offenders, "many of them violent gang members," could be
released as early as March. "Before we take that step, we need
to think long and hard about whether that's the best way to go
about this -- whether it best serves the interests of justice
and public safety," Mukasey said. "A sudden influx of criminals
from federal prison into your communities could lead to a surge
in new victims with a tragic but predictable result."

Jurists and sentencing reform analysts contacted by the Los
Angeles Times
(http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-crime25jan25,1,2272175.story?ctrack=6&cset=true)
were quick to criticize Mukasey's remarks. "In the grand sweep
of the nation's criminal justice system, the release of this
minuscule number of prisoners will not affect crime rates. It
will, however, significantly improve the perceived fairness of
our federal criminal justice system," said Paul Cassell, a
professor at the University of Utah law school and prominent
conservative, noting that no prisoner would be released early
unless a judge found he was not a threat to the community. "All
of these prisoners were going to be released in the future,"
Cassell said, "so the retroactivity provision simply provides a
slight acceleration of their release date."

Mukasey's numbers are misleading, said Marc Mauer, executive
director of the Sentencing Project. "About 700,000 people are
coming out of prison this year, many of whom were convicted of a
violent offense. So now the change means we'll have 701,600
instead. Seems like he's kind of missing the point," said Mauer.

Criticism notwithstanding, Mukasey was back at it again last
Friday. In a press briefing
(http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-mukasey26jan26,1,1666319.story),
he said that the Justice Department may try to block the
sentencing guideline reforms that will lead to the early
releases. "We're going to try to do whatever we can to mitigate
it," Mukasey said. "We would obviously like to see something
done about something that we think was unwise in the first
place." The department could suggest legislation to block it, he
said, although he acknowledged it could be hard to pass in the
Democratic Congress.

"Many of those [defendants eligible for release] were involved
in violence, and can be expected to continue after they get
out," Mukasey told reporters. He reiterated his comments from
the previous day that he was concerned the early release
prisoners might not have received job training and drug
treatment. "None of that will have happened, or a lot of it will
not have happened, by the time some of these folks get out," he
said. "And that's a cause of anxiety."

Douglas Berman, professor of law at Ohio State University and
published of the Sentencing Law and Policy
(http://sentencing.typepad.com/sentencing_law_and_policy/2008/01/ag-mukasey-talk.html)
blog, speculated, "I suspect AG Mukasey is now being 'unusually
outspoken' primarily to influence federal district judges as
they consider motions for crack sentencing modifications. As the
AG knows, no defendant will get a reduced sentence without
judicial approval. During the post-Booker period, tough talk by
DOJ has led judges to be particularly cautious about lenient
sentences that might become 'tough-on-crime' political talking
points. I suspect that the AG and main Justice hope that tough
talk about going to Congress might make it easier for local
federal prosecutors to oppose sentence reductions in individual
cases."


----------------------------------------------------------------
An update from this week's Drug War Chronicle

7. Sentencing: Mukasey Tells Congress to Pass Bill Blocking
Early Release for Crack Prisoners
http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/522/mukasey_congress_block_crack_retroactivity

US Attorney General Michael Mukasey took his campaign against
retroactive early releases for people sentenced under the
federal crack cocaine laws to a new level Wednesday as he called
on Congress to pass legislation by March 3 to block the
releases. This week's call to arms comes just a few days after
Mukasey first sounded the alarm about the release of crack
prisoners
(http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/521/attorney_general_mukasey_crack_early_release),
raising the specter of thousands of criminals pouring out of the
nation's prisons and wreaking havoc on the streets.

Mukasey is responding to a decision by the US Sentencing
Commission in December to make changes in the crack sentencing
guidelines retroactive so they will apply to about 20,000
prisoners doing time under the crack laws. Earlier in the year,
the commission had changed the sentencing guidelines for current
offenders. The decision making the changes retroactive will go
into effect March 3.

While as many as 20,000 crack prisoners could apply for sentence
cuts, each one will have to go through a judicial process, and
the cuts are not guaranteed. And only about 1,600 of them are
eligible for sentence cuts that could result in their being
released this year.

But that hasn't stopped Mukasey from playing up the fear angle.
He was at it again Wednesday during a House Judiciary Committee
hearing. In testimony prepared for that hearing, Mukasey said,
"Overall, the Sentencing Commission estimates that retroactive
applications of these lower guidelines could lead to the
re-sentencing of more than 20,000 crack cocaine offenders, any
number of whom will be released early."

Congress needs to act to avert that threat, Mukasey said. But
given that March 3 is less than a month away, given that
Congress very rarely moves so swiftly, and given that Congress
passed on the chance to kill the retroactivity provision last
year, Mukasey seems unlikely to get his wish.


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OfflineSeussA
Error: divide byzero


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Re: Crack Sentencing Reform Hysteria... Oh Noes, those bad men will be released says Att. General [Re: Alan Rockefeller]
    #7997738 - 02/08/08 07:26 PM (15 years, 11 months ago)

> 20,000 crack prisoners

At an average cost of $22,000 per prisoner per year... thats around half a billion dollars per year that the law enforcement community loses. This says nothing about the prison construction sector that would lose $54,000 per new bed.

Do you really want to see prison guards and prison construction workers out of a job? (sarcasm for the impaired)


--------------------
Just another spore in the wind.


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OfflineMolasses
sobriety with aside of what thefuck am i doing?
Male


Registered: 11/03/07
Posts: 564
Loc: Marijuanaville, Vermont
Last seen: 11 years, 5 months
Re: Crack Sentencing Reform Hysteria... Oh Noes, those bad men will be released says Att. General [Re: Seuss]
    #7998789 - 02/09/08 12:47 AM (15 years, 11 months ago)

wow, so how do we impeach this fucktard from attorney general?


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