Federal Criminal Sentencing In 2021

The US Sentencing Commission has released its "Overview of Federal Criminal Cases, Fiscal Year 2021." According to the Commission's summary of the report: 

The United States Sentencing Commission received information on 57,377 federal criminal cases in which the offender was sentenced in fiscal year 2021. Among these cases, 57,287 involved an individual offender and 90 involved a corporation or other “organizational” offender [ed. about one in 637 sentenced criminal defendants]. The Commission also received information on 4,680 cases in which the court resentenced the offender or otherwise modified the sentence that had been previously imposed. . . . 

The 57,287 individual original cases reported to the Commission in fiscal year 2021 represent a decrease of 7,278 (11.3%) cases from fiscal year 2020, and the lowest number of cases since fiscal year 1999. The number of offenders sentenced in the federal courts reached a peak in fiscal year 2011 and the number of cases reported in fiscal year 2021 was 33.5 percent below that level. . . .

Cases involving drugs, immigration, firearms, and fraud, theft, or embezzlement accounted for 83.1% of all cases reported to the Commission.

Drug offenses overtook immigration offenses as the most common federal crime in fiscal year 2021, accounting for 31.3% of the total caseload. . . .

Methamphetamine remained the most prevalent drug type. The 8,494 methamphetamine cases accounted for 48.0 percent of all drug crimes. The proportion of methamphetamine cases has increased steadily since fiscal year 2017, when those cases accounted for 36.6 percent of all drug cases.

The number of fentanyl cases increased 45.2 percent from the year before and now constitute the fourth most numerous drug type. In contrast, the proportion of the drug caseload involving heroin and marijuana has steadily decreased over the last five years.

Via the Sentencing Law and Policy blog.

Big picture conclusions:

1. Federal criminal prosecutions declined about 11% due to the pandemic but have already declined from their peak in 2011 despite population growth of 6.8% in the U.S. from 2011 to 2021. The rate at which individuals are sentenced to federal crimes in the U.S. per 100,000 people declined 37.8% from 2011 to 2021. 

Other data not included in the report suggests that declining crime rates more generally was one of the main factors, even though the rate at which people are convicted of federal crimes (which make up a subject-matter selected and quite small share of the total number of criminal convictions in the U.S.) is not necessarily a function of the overall crime rate.

2. Prosecutions for firearm offenses and drug offenses in the federal courts are largely driven by long mandatory minimum sentences there that are not present in state courts. Most are open and shut cases proven with undeniable evidence of possession of drugs or of possession of a firearm by someone not permitted to do so, and are often referred to the federal government by local law enforcement. Very few of these cases have anything intrinsic to the offense that makes them obviously better suited to use of the federal criminal justice system than to the state criminal justice system.

3. Immigration offenses are one of the few categories of crimes for which the federal courts have exclusive jurisdiction so it isn't too surprising that these cases make up a big share of the federal criminal docket. Many of these offenses are low level misdemeanors that could have been handled as civil matters instead.

4. White collar, non-violent property crimes make up a big share of federal criminal cases. This is driven largely by expertise, interest, and the availability of resources to handle these cases. The conduct in question is almost always also a crime under state law. But often these cases are incident to and discovered in connection with federal regulatory laws like securities fraud, intellectual property infringement prohibitions, and consumer protection laws.

5.  The federal courts handle few serious violent crimes, and a lot of those involve cases in Indian Country (a legal term of art), or were committed on federal land. The relative lack of hardened violent "blue collar" criminals makes federal prisons more attractive than state prisons to criminal defendants.

6. It would not be difficult at all to dramatically reduce the federal criminal docket and the size of the federal prison system by shifting a large share of federal cases to the state courts and treating minor federal immigration offenses as civil matters, without doing significant harm to important criminal justice policies. As it is about 12.3% of people who are incarcerated are incarcerated for a criminal conviction were convicted of federal crimes (about one in eight) and only about 2% of criminal trials take place in federal court. Yet, those numbers could easily be reduced by more than 50% with a handful of statutory amendments.