This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, July 23rd, 2014.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The U.S. Sentencing Commission has taken steps to release tens of thousands of federal prisoners convicted of drug crimes,

making recent sentencing reforms retroactive.

Molly Gill is with families against mandatory minimums.

She details the changes to federal sentencing.

The US Sentencing Commission voted unanimously to reduce drug sentencing guidelines for 46,000 federal prisoners.

And that is a big deal because it's going to save billions of dollars over the next 30 years

because the average sentence reduction is two years which means lots of people will be

reunited with their families much sooner and because it's a sign that even the Sentencing

Commission believes that our drug policies are too extreme and our drug sentences are too long.

So what did obviously the Sentencing Commission has broad authority to undertake this by themselves

and Congress can decide whether or not to allow that to proceed.

What brought this about?

Well, it really goes back to a technical glitch in the way the guidelines were written

30 years ago.

The Congress created mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes back in 1986, and in 1987 the first

set of sentencing guidelines went into effect.

The Commission wanted to follow Congress's lead and match up the guideline sentences with

the mandatory minimums, but they made a mistake.

They actually made the guideline drug sentences higher than the drug mandatory minimums set by Congress.

So now 30 years later, the Commission is going back and saying these sentences are too long.

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