To dismantle the America’s dehumanizing and racially skewed human caging system, we must eliminate mandatory minimums. Forget swinging the pendulum from tough-on-crime to leniency; it always swings back. Instead, we need a paradigm shift. A paradigm shift occurs in three phases: it starts with a dominant paradigm, moves through a crisis phase, and ends with “a revolutionary change in world-view” that constitutes a new dominant paradigm.

Currently, the dominant paradigm in the criminal legal system is the myth that imposing harsh mandatory minimum sentences and locking people of color in cages are necessary to keep white people safe. At the federal level alone, mandatory minimum penalties form the cornerstone of the human caging system. Prosecutors’ use of mandatory minimums in over half of all federal cases disproportionately impacts poor people of color and has driven the exponential growth in the federal prison population in recent decades. All 50 states and DC also have mandatory minimum sentencing laws.

The principle that underlies mandatory minimums is dehumanization. As Isabel Wilkerson writes, our country’s racial “caste system relies on dehumanization to lock the marginalized outside the norms of humanity so that any action against them is seen as reasonable.” So many of the horrors Wilkerson catalogs in the “program of purposeful dehumanization” instituted by the Nazis and by the United States during chattel slavery have analogues in today’s carceral state: anonymous uniforms replacing clothing, inmate numbers supplanting names, the shaving of heads, the roll calls. Racial disparities in the application of mandatory minimums are a particularly stark illustration of Wilkerson’s thesis. Mandatory minimums dehumanize people by — in the words of Judge Stephanos Bibas — acting as “sledgehammers rather than scalpels,” falling with equal force on people whose circumstances are dramatically different from one another and preventing judges from calibrating punishment to suit the person or the crime.

Read more at Brennan Center for Justice