United States Sentencing Commission, Fifteen Years of Guidelines Sentencing: An
Assessment of How Well the Federal Criminal Justice System is Achieving the Goals of
Sentencing Reform, 2004.

Available at: http://www.ussc.gov/15_year/15year.htm

The career offender provision is a sentencing rule “that [has] a
disproportionate impact on a particular offender group [namely, African-
Americans] but that serve[s] no clear sentencing purpose . . . The recidivism
rate for career offenders more closely resembles the rates for offenders in
the lower criminal history categories in which they would be placed under the
normal criminal history scoring rules in Chapter Four of the Guidelines
Manual. The career offender guideline thus makes the criminal history
category a less perfect measure of recidivism than it would be without the
inclusion of offenders qualifying only because of prior drug offenses.” Id.at
134 (emphasis in original).

Anne E. Blanchard & Kristen Gartman Rogers, Presumptively Unreasonable: Using the
Sentencing Commission’s Words to Attack the Advisory Guidelines, The Champion, March
2005, at 24.

“The career offender provision is not necessary to protect the public from
future crimes of the defendant when the provision’s application to the
defendant rests on his or her prior drug trafficking convictions.” Id. at 27.

Amy Baron-Evans, Sentencing Resource Counsel, Enforcing the New Sentencing Law:
Advanced Federal Criminal Appellate Practice Seminar, March 2006.

“The Career Offender guideline has a racially disparate impact on Blacks that
is not warranted by an increased risk of recidivism.” Id.at 20.

“The racial disparity is not warranted because the recidivism rate for
offenders whose ‘career offenders’ status is based on controlled substance
offenses is not more than that for offenders in the criminal history category
in which they would have been placed under normal criminal history rules.
This means that career offender status is unwarranted in any case in which
the predicates are controlled substance offenses, regardless of the
defendant’s race.” Id.at 20.

“The use of non-moving violations in the criminal history score may also
adversely affect minorities.” Id.at 20.