MISSISSIPPIAGAINSTMANDATORYMINIMUMS

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What are mandatory minimums?Mandatory minimum sentencing laws

require judges to automatically hand out minimum prison terms to those convicted of certain crimes. Mississippi has some of the harshest mandatory minimums

out of all 50 states, and our prisons are suffering for it. According to the U.S.

Department of Justice, Mississippi has the nation’s second highest per capita

incarceration rate.

What can you do?

Mississippi Against Mandatory MinimumsPromoting Justice and Efficiency

in Mississippi

Join us in our fight for reform! Mississippi Against Mandatory Minimums is a non-profit committed to proposing legislation

to reform Mississippi’s mandatory minimum laws. We seek to reform

the current sentencing laws, expand drug courts, and eliminate mandatory

minimums for all non-violent drug cases.

It’s your money. It’s your safety. It’s your community.

Yet the Mississippi Department of Corrections (MDOC) spent $339 million

of your tax dollars this year, and next year it plans to spend $368 million. In fact, state corrections spending is

growing faster than that for education, transportation, and everything else

except Medicaid.

If automatic laws, not qualified judges, are putting prisoners behind bars, how can we be sure that our tax dollars are

being put to good use?

For all the money we’re spending on them, prisons aren’t making our streets safer or better. The number of prisoners

behind bars for drug crimes has increased tenfold from 50,000 in 1980 to 500,000 today, yet cocaine, heroin, and other illegal drugs are just as available today as they were in 1980, and often

even at lower prices.

Social scientists believe that the prison system is now so saturated that the net effect on communities is starting

to become decidedly negative. In their words, it’s becoming “crimogenic.”

“Our states are in trouble and no amount of budget gimmicks, political

posturing or hiding bills will fix the massive debt that they face.”

– Bob Williams, President of State Budget Solutions

“Today, my guess is that the costs outweigh the benefits at the margins.

I think we should be shrinking the prison population by at least one-

third.” – Steven D. Levitt, University of Chicago

economist and co-author of Freakonomics

Crimogenic (adj.) – “creating more crime over the long term by harming

the social fabric in communities and permanently damaging the

economic prospets of prisoners as well as their families.”