Between April 1991 and June 1992, several individuals were sentenced to lengthy prison terms after trying to sell crack cocaine to Pamela Mersky, an undercover agent working for the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in Boston and its suburbs (US Court of Appeals 1994). Among the individuals sentenced to mandatory prison was Paulita Cadiz, a young pregnant woman with no criminal record. According to the investigations, the 18-year-old woman went for a 10-minute car ride with a drug dealer who asked her to meet the undercover agent. Pamela Mersky recorded Cadiz offering to approach the drug dealer's car before the DEA officer went to another nearby vehicle to purchase crack cocaine (Brelis 1992). Even though Cadiz pleaded innocent, arguing that she was not aware of the illicit transaction, she received a mandatory 10-year prison sentence for aiding the drug dealer. The imprisonment of first-time offenders was not an extraordinary event in the US by the time Cadiz received her sentence. In 1992, drug offenders accounted for over half of federal prison population (Miller and Freed 1994). Similar to Cadiz, about 36 per cent of those prisoners could be classified as ‘low-level’ drug offenders (Roth 1994). Reports show that the prison population with no criminal history in 1992 were serving 2.5 times as long as their 1985 counterparts (Katz and Durham 1994).

In an effort to draw attention to the stringency of the US criminal justice system during the 1990s, especially in terms of mandatory minimum sentences, President Bill Clinton's attorney general, Janet Reno, ordered the Department of Justice to conduct a study on nonviolent drug offenders incarcerated in the US (Katz and Durham 1994).