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A federal judge in Tennessee retired on Friday after serving six years on the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee and is formally denouncing mandatory minimum sentencing laws that require judges to administer prison terms of a particular length for people convicted of certain federal and state crimes.

“If there was any way I could have not given him life in prison I would have done it,” said Kevin Sharp, the now-former federal judge, recalling a sentencing hearing in 2014. “What they did was wrong, they deserved some time in prison, but not life.”

Mandatory minimums undermine the United States’ commitment to justice and fairness by preventing judges from taking into account an individual’s background and the circumstances of their offenses in the sentencing determination. As a result, they’ve caused our prison populations to soar, leading to overcrowding and exorbitant costs to taxpayers. And that explosion of the prison population has had a disproportionate impact on communities of color, particularly African-American communities.

In August 2012, Judge Mark W. Bennett of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Iowa wrote, “If lengthy mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug addicts actually worked, one might be able to rationalize them. But there is no evidence that they do,” Bennett wrote. “I have seen how they leave hundreds of thousands of young children parentless and thousands of aging, infirm and dying parents childless. They destroy families and mightily fuel the cycle of poverty and addiction. In fact, I have been at this so long, I am now sentencing the grown children of people I long ago sent to prison.”

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