With Federal Prison Population at 20 Year Low, Now's the Time to Release Marijuana Offenders

Yesterday Professor Doug Berman at Sentencing Law & Policy noted that:

In 2013, the federal prison population reach a peak of around 220,000 total prisoners.  As we close out 2020, the latest BOP numbers at this webpage report "Total Federal Inmates" at only 154,125.  A 30% decline in the federal prison poplation in less than a decade strikes me as something to be thankful for, and the last time the federal prison population was this low was way back in the year 2000.  (That said, any celebration of positive federal carceral trends should be tempered the fact that BOP still reports that more than 30,000 federal prisoners are over age 50, and that nearly 50% of persons in federal prison are servng time for drug offenses despite widespread acknowledgement of the many failings of the war on drugs.)

While we don’t have a good estimate of the number of federal prisoners incarcerated for nonviolent marijuana offenses, we’ve heard estimates as high as 15,000. In 2017, US Senator Cory Booker noted that there were 17,000 federal offenders serving time for non-violent drug offenses, including DOJ data from 2012 indicating there were roughly 11,500 nonviolent marijuana offenders.