Mandatory minimums should be used as punishments only. Obviously the release should depend by rehabilitation(mandatory).

Who/how determines rehabilitation? If the prison benefits financially from a prisoner staying in prison how is that going to work in practice?

I goggled this: https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen...

I think it's kind of interesting. The people one might concerned about are probably: "Homicide, Aggravated Assault, and Kidnapping Offenses" -> 3.2% of prisoners. "Robbery" -> 2.8% ...

I think the first question is what % of all prisoners should probably not be there in the first place and how do you deal with the root causes of them getting there. Then we can worry about when we let them out.

Mandatory minimums do work. They don't work when they're draconian measures passed in law-and-order frenzies by reactionaries, but they work for decreasing sentencing disparities between sympathetic criminals and unsympathetic ones.

The fact that the mandatory minimums for crack were so much higher than for powder cocaine was a good thing. They're an admission that the system is openly racist, and a target to aim at. Without them, we'd just have judges sentencing white snorters to probation and putting black smokers under the jail on their own discretion, and we'd need statistics that we wouldn't be given access to in order to make a case. It's better when racism is out in the open rather than buried in a judge's latitude.

Surely I must be misunderstanding everything you just said.

> The fact that the mandatory minimums for crack were so much higher than for powder cocaine was a good thing. They're an admission that the system is openly racist, and a target to aim at.

So you're saying the system is racist and we're seeing it in the value of mandatory minimums, therefore we should aim for more mandatory minimums to even out the racism? Do you believe the same thing when it comes to police shooting black men, i.e. that more white men should also get shot in order to live in a world that's more fair? Therefore making it a "good thing" that people get shot at all?