“Last month, retired federal judge Shira A. Scheindlin shared her experiences imposing mandatory minimum sentences in a Washington Post “Perspective” piece.
“’Mandatory minimums were almost always excessive,’ she wrote, ‘and they made me feel unethical, even dirty.’
“According to Judge Scheindlin, ‘The fact that the United States, with less than 5 percent of the world’s population, incarcerates 25 percent of the world’s prisoners is largely due to mandatory minimum sentences.’”