Government Starts Cutting Sentences Of Crack Inmates

"I had never been in trouble before," Marshall said. "I just couldn't understand why they wouldn't ask, 'Why would someone wait until they were 36 years old to get in trouble?' "

In congressional testimony and in speeches, Mukasey said not every offender eligible for release is like Marshall. Eighty percent have prior criminal records and are likely to commit another crime.

But a Sentencing Commission analysis said most of the convicts eligible for immediate release were small-time offenders who are nonviolent. A 2005 analysis found that nearly 90 percent of crack offenses were nonviolent, about the same as powder cocaine offenses.

Vernon Watts is the kind of major drug dealer that Mukasey is concerned about. He received a 22-year sentence for possessing 559 grams of crack cocaine and served 16 years before he was freed Feb. 12 because of the sentencing reduction.

Watts, who took computer programming classes and drug rehabilitation classes even though "I've never used drugs in my life," said he will have to earn Mukasey's trust.

Although he felt his sentence did not seem to fit his offense, he said, "it was what it was. We were out there doing wrong. When you're destroying people and communities, I'm not going to say I was done wrong. I accept my responsibility."

Meanwhile, the Vienna-based International Narcotics Control Board called today for more "proportionality" in the way some governments prosecute drug offenders. The 2007 annual report of the INCB, an independent body under the auspices of the United Nations that monitors compliance with international treaties, cited lengthy mandatory sentences in the United States for personal drug possession and use, and it noted that other countries draw sharper lines between such use and drug trafficking and sales.