By Nkechi Taifa, senior policy analyst for the Open Society Policy Center. She will discuss drug policy reform during two panel discussions at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s Annual Legislative Conference this week.
For a quarter of a century mandatory minimum sentences have resulted in egregiously severe and harsh punishments which often do not fit the crime, have racially disparate outcomes, increase overcrowding, and exacerbate prison costs. These sentences are the result of a war on drugs that has been disproportionately fought in Black and Latino communities. The impact of the war on drugs on individuals, families, and communities has been likened to a “new Jim Crow,” resulting in the mass incarceration and over-representation of people of color in the criminal justice system.
As a quick reminder: A mandatory minimum sentence is a prison term predetermined by Congress and automatically imposed for certain crimes, primarily drugs and firearms. It is the minimum penalty that a judge must impose. In most cases the sentence is at least five years, and often it is 10, 15, or 20 years or more, even for nonviolent first time offenders.
One of the problems with inflexible mandatory sentencing laws is that they are applied regardless of the role of the defendant and of other factors, which judges traditionally take into account for sentencing, such as the history and characteristics of the defendant and the likelihood of rehabilitation.
This weekend hundreds of thousands will travel to Washington, D.C. to witness the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr Memorial dedication service. Millions more will follow closely via Facebook, Twitter, foursquare and television. Inevitably, those watching this historic moment will ask themselves, have we become the nation Dr. King talked about in his speeches? Are we the promised land? Or do we have a ways to go?
The rhetoric and policies of the so-called war on drugs may be the cultural norm, but they aren’t always sensible. Our lawmakers should have listened to Milton Friedman, who 
The Obama administration today 
In the midst of often rancorous debate on Capitol Hill, growing bipartisanship is developing in an area that many would have thought extremely unlikely: criminal justice reform. Just last week legislation to establish a national commission to examine the criminal justice system was introduced in the House by the unlikely mix of liberal Democrats William Delahunt and Marcia Fudge along with conservative Republicans Darrell Issa and Tom Rooney. The legislation mirrors a bipartisan bill, introduced by Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA), passed by the Senate Judiciary Committee earlier this year. At the time of the bill's introduction, Sen. Webb wrote, "With so many of our citizens in prison compared to the rest of the world, there are only two possibilities. Either we are home to the most evil people on earth or we are doing something different - and vastly counterproductive. Obviously, the answer is the latter."