Summary

“Locking Up Thugs Is Not Vindictive” – Sentencing, 1981-82. The author begins this chapter with a description of a case he worked on early in his career as a public defender, that of a woman that he knew was addicted to heroin who was likely to spend the rest of her life in jail if she was convicted of the drug possession charge she was facing. The author then uses this particular situation as a springboard to examine the origins of mandatory minimum, and high maximum, sentencing for crimes involving possession and selling of drugs, said sentencing (he says) having affecting a disproportionately high number of black defendants. A key element of his consideration involves the documentation of efforts to develop and eventually pass laws setting those mandatory minimums, efforts led in Washington D.C. by Burrell Jefferson and a black anti-drug, anti-crime...