Our justice system doesn't work very well, for the Sixth Amendment states in part that the accused has the: "….right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State…" but, in fact, trials in America are not speedy and even worse, most of those accused of a crime, never actually have a trial, but instead plea bargain a deal, which is inherently unjust. One of the most fundamental problems with mandatory minimum sentences is that if the crime you are accused of, has a mandatory minimum sentence attached to it, this puts incredible pressure on the defendant to plea bargain to a deal which will be less than the penalty of the mandatory minimum, so that whether the defendant is guilty or not, or whether he has exculpatory evidence or not, or whether he is innocent of the actual charges or not, and so on and so forth, pleas are made because it often is the most prudent thing to do. Additionally, because trials are never speedy, defendants have a vested interest when they are unable to post bail, of which thousands of such defendants suffer from this, to make whatever deal that they can make, for they are already behind bars to begin with.
While there are reasonable arguments for mandatory minimums in the sense that two very similar crimes are committed at different locales, in which one defendant's sentence is far lesser than another, that, in of itself, with no other information, isn't a good enough justification, for every crime is different in its circumstances, in the perpetrator, and so on and so forth. Then there is also the argument that the sure penalty of the law will dissuade potential criminals from committing the crime in the first place, but, in fact, most criminals aren't really familiar with the penalty that they will be charged for a particular crime, and hence, that isn't the controlling factor in their behavior, for despite all the crime and punishment, all of the mandatory minimums, crime keeps getting committed again and again and again, as if criminals aren't dissuaded by such potential punishment, no matter how mandatory.
So too, the most insidious part of mandatory minimums is the very fact, that somehow, it has become standard policy, that the best way to deal with crime, is to incarcerate people, but if this was really true to begin with, than America as the leader by a very wide margin in the western world for incarceration per population, would have already solved its crime problem but it has not. This signifies quite clearly that any justice system that mandates minimum sentences for so many crimes has got it all wrong, for if certain minimum punishment really prevented future crime, then the crime rate in America would be trending towards zero, but it has not.
In point of fact, mandating minimum sentences seems to say, that judges are clueless as to how to appropriately deal with the penalty phase of a trial, that their discretion in sentencing is suspect, in addition to the inconvenient fact, that somehow, crimes are always cookie cutter clear-cut, so that the penalties for crime need not take into account extenuating circumstances or the humanity of the people being so punished. All of this is fundamentally flawed, and mandatory minimums are in actuality and in impact, a form of injustice, that is cruel and unjust. Mandatory minimums do not work; they never will work, they are a bastardization of justice, and mandatory minimums unfairly targets those that have the fewest resources to defend themselves appropriately, indicating that mandatory minimums dishonors this great nation and what it represents.