the proposal was popular with the general public, and therefore with Congress, it attracted criticism from several quarters in the legal and criminal justice communities. Some of the criticism was similar to that aimed at the state laws. Such laws could potentially swamp the prisons with large numbers of felons serving extremely long sentences. This could place an extreme burden upon government financial resources as more prisons are built and large numbers of elderly inmates require increasing services. Another criticism is that such a strict mandatory sentencing law reduces the power of judges to tailor punishment in individual cases. Conversely, attorneys acquire more power as suspects are encouraged to plea bargain for lesser sentences (by confessing to lesser crimes) (Economist, 1994, February 5, pp. 16-17).
In reality, U.S. prisons are already overcrowded. The U.S. has the largest incarceration rate of any industrialized country in the world. More than four hundred out of every one hundred thousand persons in the United States live in prisons and jails and the total inmate population is quickly approaching 1.4 million. Prison officials are being forced to release career criminals to make room for the overwhelming numbers of individuals convicted of first-time drug offenses. Although the public has generally supported the construction of new prison facilities, the fiscal crises affecting most governments has limited the availability of this solution. In addition, the mandatory sentencing laws concerning drug offenses are filling up the new prison space faster than it can be constructed (Smolowe, 1994, February 7, pp. 55-56).
Drug offenders represent a larger percentage of federal inmates than state inmates. Sixty-one percent of all federal inmates are serving time for narcotics offenses; twenty-one percent of federal prison inmates have been convicted of nonviolent and non-sophisticated crimes and have no prior p...