Email, Julie Samuels, senior fellow in the Justice Policy Center at the Urban Institute, June 10, 2016
3:11 p.m.
Based on the data you shared, it looks like these are FY 2016 marijuana cases from Arizona – probably from the border (Tucson office). If you don’t want to call the US Attorney’s office, I’d suggest you call the Federal Public Defender’s office. The office should have more information about the nature of the cases and why they received a prison term (for example if they were fast track or backpacker cases). I believe Jon Sands is the head of the office.
Also, here’s a link to a report from the US Sentencing Commission regarding alternatives to incarceration. See, p.6, which is not specific to drug possession, but discusses the general issue.
The low rate of alternative sentences for offenders whose sentencing ranges are in Zones A, B, and C is, in part, attributable to the large number of non-citizen offenders with sentencing ranges in those zones. Non-citizens, as a practical matter, are ineligible for most alternatives because of their status as deportable aliens (resulting in immigration detainers that prevent their release into the community). Aliens convicted of many types of federal offenses are subject to deportation from the United States as “aggravated felons.” Because of these immigration policies, rates of alternative sentences are substantially impacted by the proportion of non-citizens in the federal offender population. As shown in Figure 4, non-citizen offenders predominated in the three zones for which the guidelines provide for alternative sentences. In 2014, non-citizens constituted the majority of offenders with sentencing ranges in Zones A (66.7%) and B (63.8%) and nearly half of offenders in Zone C (49.7%). In 2014 immigration-related offenses accounted for 87.6 percent of convictions for non-citizens with sentencing ranges in Zones A through C. In comparison, immigration-related offenses accounted for a slightly smaller proportion of convictions for noncitizens with sentencing ranges in Zone D (72.7%) due to the larger proportion of drug-related offenses in that zone. Because non-citizens generally are precluded from receiving alternative sentences, those offenders were excluded from the remaining analyses in this report.