Sure. For a lot of these penalties, research has been done on the varying lengths of time, from long sentences to shorter sentences. At the arrest level, if police feel that the penalty will be unjust and they don't want to do it, they just don't make the arrest. If it comes into court, whoever's in charge of charging can move the charge around. At the trial level, you will see more dismissals or pleading to offences that don't have the mandatory minimum. You'll see it like that.
You also see it used to coerce plea deals in some cases. People who make it through the prosecution phase and into the conviction phase tend to have longer sentences.
Again, I think the thought behind mandatory minimums is that we can kind of get rid of the complication of the hard work of dealing with crime and just kind of make it clean. What the research shows consistently is that mandatory minimums actually make things more uncertain and less predictable; they breed distrust within the system itself, with the people who are dealing with it, and in that sense too, they tend to perpetuate the same sorts of problems that generate mandatory minimums. People in the public, law enforcement and public officials see sentences that don't seem to match the crime.
I think, insofar as I understand the conversation today, it's not an issue of whether these are the kinds of crimes that someone can be sent to prison for. That's not what's at issue. The issue is whether judges can have reviewable discretion to make different kinds of choices.