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My Half Century Traversing the Arc of
Federal Sentencing
HON. MARK W. BENNETT (RET.)
The author retired as a U.S. district judge (for the Northern District of Iowa) in 2019 to become the first director of
the Drake University Institute for Justice Reform and Innovation.
In the more than 50 years since I graduated from law school,
there is no area of federal law that has affected more lives with
more dramatic pendulum swings than federal sentencing. I am
now a retired federal judge who has spent nearly a third of my
life populating the Federal Bureau of Prisons by sentencing more
than 4,000 offenders, in five federal districts spanning the two
districts in Iowa to the District of Arizona, the District of North
Dakota, and the farthest reach of the federal courts in the District
of the Northern Mariana Islands in Saipan.
Flash-back to the summer of 1975: having started my own law
firm after graduating from law school, I was involved in my first
federal sentencing as a novice but eager defense lawyer. The de-
fendant was to be sentenced by a conservative but fair federal
district judge. The defendant was a low-level small-time nonvio-
lent, addict drug dealer with no prior criminal record other than
two aging minor misdemeanors. Despite my lack of experience,
he was sentenced to three years of probation and drug treatment.
Back then, probation was common for nonviolent first offenders.
Had an identical defendant appeared before me as a federal dis-
trict judge, and many hundreds of them did, the defendant would
have received a mandatory minimum 120-month or 240-month
sentence, or possibly even more, depending on the drug quantity
and aggravating factors. This article chronicles the jaw-dropping
arc of federal sentencing and the federal sentencing guidelines
that help explain, but do not justify, this staggering disparity.
I have a deep and very personal connection to federal sentenc-
ing, having sentenced offenders to federal prisons ranging from
several months to life—and on two occasions affirming jury sen-
tences to death (the only time jurors decide a sentence in federal
court). Perhaps more curious to some, while serving as a federal
judge, I visited in many federal prisons more than 400 offend-
ers that I had sentenced. For a discussion of the impact of such
interactions, see the TED Talk by civil rights and civil liberties
lawyer Bryan Stevenson, The Power of Proximity, April9, 2021,
on YouTube. More about my prison visits and proximity later.
One could assume that the Northern District of Iowa, pri-
marily a rural farming district, was a sleepy one in terms of fed-
eral criminal prosecutions. Nothing was and is further from the
truth. During most of my 24 years on the district court bench, the
Northern District of Iowa was the fifth or sixth busiest sentencing
district of the nation’s 94 districts in the number of sentencings
per judge. This is due in large part to Interstates35 (north-south)
and 80 (east-west), which intersect Iowa, making that district the
heartland of a methamphetamine interstate pipeline.
The History of Federal Sentencing
To better understand the arc of federal sentencing and the central
role that the federal sentencing guidelines and mandatory mini-
mums play in it, a brief history of federal sentencing is helpful.
Its story is about a pendulum: wide judicial discretion to help al-
leviate the potential harshness of federal sentencing in individual
cases, followed by severe limits on that discretion in an attempt
to end alleged disparities in punishment flowing from that very
