1. Short title This Act may be cited as the Mandatory Minimum Reform Act of 2017 . 2. Findings Congress makes the following findings: (1) Mandatory minimum sentences are statutorily prescribed terms of imprisonment that automatically attach upon conviction of certain criminal conduct, often pertaining to drug offenses. Absent very narrow criteria for relief, a sentencing judge is powerless to mandate a term of imprisonment below the mandatory minimum. Mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses rely solely upon the weight of the substance as a proxy for the defendant’s role and degree of involvement. (2) In the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, and at the height of the public concern over crack cocaine, Congress acted hastily, without sufficient hearings, and enacted hard line penalties that targeted low-level drug offenders. These penalties included new, long mandatory minimum sentences for such offenders. (3) According to the Bureau of Prisons, in 1986, when the new drug law containing lengthy mandatory minimum sentences passed, the prison population was 36,000. Today, the Federal prison population is over 187,000 prisoners, up over 400 percent in 31 years. (4) According to the Bureau of Prisons, the average cost to keep one prisoner in Federal prison for the fiscal year of 2015 was $31,977.65, which equates to $87.61 per day. (5) Annual spending on the Federal prison system rose by over 600 percent, from roughly $966,000,000 to more than $6.9 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars, between 1980 and 2015. (6) According to the U.S. Sentencing Commission, between 1995 and 2010, over 400,000 drug offenders were sentenced under Federal law