Marijuana Offenders Comprised 8% of Defendants Sent to Prison in 2015
Eight percent of defendants sentenced to federal prison in 2015 were convicted of violating marijuana laws, according to a June 2016 federal report issued by the United States Sentencing Commission.
The federal government prosecuted 71,184 cases in 2015 in which the offender was sentenced to a federal penitentiary. Nearly one-third (31.8%) of these cases were for drug violations – the most common type of case prosecuted by the Feds.
Of these federal drug prosecutions, 25% involved defendants sentenced to prison for violating marijuana laws. Overall, these 5,612 federal offenders comprised 7.8% of all of new defendants sentenced to federal prison last year.
Marijuana defendants in 2015 received an average sentence of 32 months – the lowest average time of imprisonment for drug offenders.
Another report issued earlier this year found that marijuana offenders comprise just over 12% of all federal drug inmates.
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Paul Armentano is the Deputy Director of NORML, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, and a Senior Policy Advisor at Freedom Leaf. He also serves on the faculty of Oaksterdam University. Mr. Armentano’s writing and research on marijuana policy have appeared in well over 750 publications, scholarly and/or peer-reviewed journals, as well as in more than two dozen textbooks and anthologies. He is the co-author of the book Marijuana is Safer: So Why Are We Driving People to Drink? (2009, Chelsea Green), which has been licensed and translated internationally, and more recently, The Citizens’ Guide to State-by-State Marijuana Laws (Whitman Books, 2015). Mr. Armentano is the 2013 Freedom Law School Health Freedom Champion of the Year and the 2013 Alfred R. Lindesmith award recipient in the achievement in the field of scholarship.
