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Delaware Center for Justice Calls for the Abolition of all Mandatory Drug Sentencing Laws in Delaware
April 12, 1999

As an important step toward a rational criminal justice policy in Delaware, the Delaware Center for Justice calls for the abolition of all mandatory drug sentencing laws. These laws do not permit judges to impose fair sentences that fit the particular circumstances of crimes, offenders, and crime victims. These laws succeed only in spending taxpayers' money that could be earmarked more effectively for education, helping troubled families, and other preventive services. Valuable prison space should be reserved for violent offenders.

An excellent example to reinforce our position is a case before a Delaware Superior Court judge last December. The judge sentenced a 24-year-old man to 78 years in prison for dealing in cocaine. Because he had a prior felony conviction and was convicted of multiple counts, Delaware law mandated a sentence of at least 78 years. The judge stated that he would have preferred to give the offender a more appropriate structured sentence, including treatment, but had no discretion to do so. Although the General Assembly has given judges the final decision about penalties in death penalty cases in Delaware, it removed judicial discretion for a variety of drug offenses.

Should the young drug dealer live to be 102 and complete his sentence, Delaware taxpayers will have spent over $1.7 million to incarcerate him at the current yearly figure of $22,000 a year, an amount that will continue to increase until 2076, the date of his release.

If current drug-sentencing laws were successful in reducing crime, perhaps they could be defended. But as the Rand Corporation's Drug Policy Research Center concluded in a comprehensive 1997 study, mandatory minimum drug sentencing statutes "do not represent an effective or efficient way of reducing drug use, drug spending, or drug-related crime."

Delaware has more people in prison, and they are staying longer. In the past fifteen years, the prison population for offenders sentenced to a year or more has increased by 116 percent, and the average sentence has increased by 29 percent. Mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses have helped to fuel the burgeoning prison population and continued increases in the corrections budget.

In fact, the corrections budget increased by 20 percent from fiscal years 1996 to 1998 and is expected to increase by 36 percent from fiscal years 1998 to 2000. Delaware cannot build or expand prison space fast enough. Today, its prison facilities are operating 170 percent over design capacity and 129 percent over operational capacity. The current three-year $128 million capital expenditure program for new prison space, when completed, will not completely alleviate overcrowding.

It is clearly time to re-examine Delaware's criminal justice policy. According to the Sentencing Accountability Commission (SENT AC):

The General Assembly has stated and SENT AC agrees, that offenders should be sentenced to the least restrictive, therefore the least costly, sanction consistent with the severity of the instant of Tense and the criminal history of the offender, with due regard for public safety. Other goals in priority order include:

• 1. Incapacitation of the violence-prone offender;
• 2. Restoration of the victim;
• 3. Rehabilitation of the offender.

Debate over Delaware criminal justice policy is obscured by the classification of most drug felonies as violent. For example, if someone is found to possess five or more grams of cocaine, they are guilty of drug trafficking, a Felony B offense, and considered to be a violent offender. Actual sales, possession of weapons, or violent behavior need not be proven, only possession. Other Felony B violent offenses include second degree murder and first degree robbery.

In a November 1998 speech at the University of Nebraska College of Law, Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Stephen G. Breyer called for the abolition of mandatory minimum sentences. He cited a 1993 speech of Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist which called mandatory minimum sentencing as a "good example of the law of unintended consequences" and concluded that it "frustrates the careful calibration of sentences."

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