Growing up in blue collar Circle Pines, Minnesota, in the 1950s, raised
by parents from the “Greatest Generation,” I dreamed only of becoming a
civil rights lawyer. My passion for justice was hard-wired into my DNA.
Never could I have imagined that by the end of my 50s, after nineteen
years as one of 678 federal district court judges in the nation, I would
have sent 1,092 of my fellow citizens to federal prison for mandatory
minimum sentences ranging from sixty months to life without the
possibility of release. The majority of these women, men and young
adults are nonviolent drug addicts. Methamphetamine is their drug of
choice. Crack cocaine is a distant second. Drug kingpins? Oh yes, I’ve
sentenced them, too. But I can count them on one hand. While I’m
extremely proud of my father’s service in World War II, I am greatly
conflicted about my role in the “war on drugs.”You might think the Northern District of Iowa—a bucolic area home to just one city with a population above 100,000—is a sleepy place with few federal crimes. You would be wrong. Of the ninety-four district courts across the United States, we have the sixth-heaviest criminal caseload per judge. Here in the heartland, I sentence more drug offenders in a single year than the average federal district court judge in New York City, Washington, Chicago, Minneapolis and San Francisco—combined. While drug cases nationally make up 29 percent of federal judges’ criminal dockets, according to the US Sentencing Commission, they make up more than 56 percent of mine. More startling, while meth cases make up 18 percent of a judge’s drug docket nationally, they account for 78 percent of mine. Add crack cocaine and together they account for 87 percent.
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