Who are the people in federal prison for drug crimes?

Byron Lamont McDade, seen last year, is serving 27 years on drug charges at Federal Correctional Institution Loretto in Pennsylvania. He hopes to receive clemency from serving his full sentence. (Photo by Michel du Cille/The Washington Post)

Thousands of federal prisoners have been released in recent days, their sentences reduced amid a growing, bipartisan sentiment that harsh punishments for drug offenders put into place in recent decades were too severe.

The Justice Department freed these inmates, with thousands more set to follow, after the U.S. Sentencing Commission — an independent agency responsible for how people convicted of federal crimes are sentenced — said last year that drug offenders should face lesser sentences and made that change retroactive.

But what do we know about the tens and tens of thousands of federal prisoners sentenced for drug crimes? What were the crimes for which they were convicted? What drugs were involved? A recent study sheds some light on this, providing a broad snapshot of a population at a moment when its membership is about to decline. This report, written by the Urban Institute and released last week by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, provides a primer of sorts for trying to understand what the situation is as calls for sentencing reforms continue.

Here are four details you should know from the report, which examined more than 94,000 people in the federal prison system in 2012. For all of these people, the drug crime was the most serious offense for which they were convicted.

More than a third had no criminal history or minimal criminal history.

This is, in many ways, a key part of the ongoing calls to reduce these sentences. When the term “nonviolent drug offender” is used as it relates to an individual crime, it tends to overlook the real fact that many of the people convicted for those drug-related crimes were deemed to have “no relevant criminal history,” the report states.

[The U.S. is releasing thousands of prisoners. Here’s where they are going.]

The U.S. Sentencing Commission uses a point system to place people into criminal history categories before they get sentenced. This looks at things like whether someone has been imprisoned and for how long. A little more than 34 percent of federal drug prisoners were in the lowest category (most of them had no points at all).

Cocaine and methamphetamine convictions account for three out of four prisoners.

When you combine powder cocaine and crack cocaine, a form of cocaine alone accounts for a little more than half of all of these prisoners. If you add methamphetamines, that pushes the number up to about 77 percent.

Most prisoners held due to crack cocaine were black. Most prisoners held due to methamphetamines were white, Hispanic or Latino.

One of the issues repeatedly raised during calls for sentencing reform has been the specific impact these harsh sentences have had on minorities. White people accounted for 22 percent of the prisoners in this study, eclipsed by black people (39 percent) and Hispanic or Latino people (37 percent). A little under a quarter of the prisoners were not U.S. citizens.

The gap between powder cocaine sentences and crack cocaine sentences

One of the most-highlighted facets of these harsh drug sentences has been the gap between the punishments for people convicted of crimes involving crack cocaine and powder cocaine. This disparity was enacted in the 1980s amid the crack-cocaine epidemic, though these sentencing guidelines were changed in 2007.

Still, it is worth noting: More than six in 10 of the prisoners convicted for crack cocaine were sentenced to at least a decade, the highest percentage of any group. One in five people convicted for crack cocaine were sentenced to at least two decades.

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