Follow-Up: Mandatory Minimums for Drug Trafficking?

To recapitulate part of what I wrote in November:

It was in New York State where the Rockefeller Drug Laws were passed into practice in 1973. Under these laws, anyone who was convicted of selling, for instance, 60 grams of marijuana would have to be sentenced to a minimum of fifteen years.

This measure was also used in future drug laws like the federal Anti-Drug Abuse Act.

All of this legislation revived (as far as I have gathered) the mandatory minimum sentences which had been removed from federal law three years earlier.

Since then, 'mandatory minimums' have been seen as a problem because they force the courts to imprison convicted criminals for excessively long periods of time — without adequately redressing, or even exacerbating, crime rates.

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Forty years after the legislation, the American radio broadcasting company NPR (together with the North Country Public Radio's Prison Time Media Project) is running a series on the Rockefeller Drug Laws. Today it described the experience of G. Prendes, a native of New York State who was affected by the Drug Laws after he was arrested at the age of 23 and then jailed, convicted, and imprisoned for a fifteen-year term.

ACCORDING to the article,

in 1977, he made the big mistake that put him in the crosshairs of the new laws: He agreed to help with a drug deal, selling a pound of cocaine upstate in Rochester, N.Y. It was a sting.

[. . . The former prisoner,] Prendes was a first-time offender, and no one saw him as a kingpin drug dealer.

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The effects were harsh for him individually but they also victimized a broader sphere:

[. . . His sister Mercedes] says their mother spent years and all the family's money trying to help him.

"It really — dismantled [us]," Mercedes says. "It was like a bomb. It had a profound effect that you don't come back from."

The journalists also spoke with the assistant district attorney who prosecuted his case. He tells them that by now he is unsure whether the sentence was fair;

"I think by today's standards, I think most people would look at this — and I guess I would look at it — and say that sentence was disproportionate."

Source:
"Decades On, Stiff Drug Sentence Leaves A Life 'Dismantled'" [NPR], by Brian Mann (February 14, 2013)