Between 2011 and 2014, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), part of the United States Department of Justice, engaged in a campaign of sting operations in which individuals were enticed to participate in gun and drug related crimes against fictitious stash house targets for which they were then arrested and convicted.
[3] A USA Today investigation in 2013 showed that over 1000 individuals have been incarcerated for lengthy periods since 2011 for such fake crimes, and that the strategy has become a key part of the Bureau's enforcement practice.
[1] ATF officials stated that the strategy pre-emptively targeted people likely to commit serious crime rather than waiting for them to do so;[1] opponents and critics, and later, judges, expressed concerns that it was tantamount to entrapment and punishing people for thoughts and possibilities rather than actual criminal acts, by presenting them with deliberately hard to resist fabricated inducements and goading them to become a participant, or to engage in more extreme criminal activities, up to an extent chosen almost completely by ATF.
"[2] In Jacobson v. United States (503 U.S. 540 (1990)) the Supreme Court considered an entrapment case from outside drug enforcement, and overturned the conviction of a Nebraska man for ordering child pornography after two years of being cajoled by material created by postal inspectors.
(Contrast Hampton v. United States, where predisposition did exist, even though the drugs and drug-related activity of the defendant in that case wholly coincided with the encouragement of law enforcement agents.)