Pubdate: Tue, 15 Nov 2011
Source: Globe and Mail (Canada)
Copyright: 2011 The Globe and Mail Company
Contact:  http://www.theglobeandmail.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/168
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?199 (Mandatory Minimum Sentencing)

MANDATORY READING ON MANDATORY MINIMUM SENTENCES

As Canada embraces mandatory minimum sentences for a multitude of 
offences, including growing as few as six marijuana plants (six 
months in prison), the United States Sentencing Commission has turned 
against that country's obligatory penalties. "Excessively severe," 
the commission says. It prefers sentencing guidelines that would 
allow judges some leeway.

It's a message Canada should take to heart. Partly because of the 
frequent use of mandatory minimums, the size of the U.S. prison 
population has exploded. A mind-boggling one in every four people 
behind bars in the world is incarcerated in the United States. In 
1985, there were 700,000 in jail; today, 2.3 million.

This is bad on many counts, but the one that has captured the 
attention of leading U.S. conservatives is cost. In Canada, the 
federal prison population rose by 1,000 to 14,500, in just 18 months, 
partly as a result of new mandatory minimums, a federal report found 
in August. At an average cost of $110,000 a year per inmate, the 
benefits would be questionable at any time - all the more so when 
economies nearly everywhere are at risk.

Judges, too, don't like them. In a survey done by the U.S. sentencing 
commission last year, 62 per cent of federal trial-court judges said 
the mandatory minimums were too high; just 38 per cent found them 
appropriate (none found them too low). A federal judge in Utah, Paul 
Cassell, explained in 2007 that he'd had to give a longer sentence to 
a first offender who carried guns to several marijuana deals and 
illegally possessed guns at home (55 years in total) than to a man 
who beat a drinking buddy to death with a log - 21 years.

Mandatory minimum sentences have deep roots in U.S. history. As early 
as 1790, in the first Congress, the mandatory minimum of the death 
penalty applied to seven crimes, including forgery and rescuing a 
person from execution. (The death penalty was not the maximum 
penalty; dissection after death could be added to "intensify" the 
punishment.) But now the commission, judges, some conservatives and 
more than a few states are trying to reverse the trend to ever-more 
and ever-longer minimums.

A key recommendation is that Congress, if it considers new minimum 
penalties, should ask the sentencing commission what the impact will 
be on the prisons. "Early analyses of prison impact may assist 
Congress in focusing increasingly strained prison resources on 
offenders who commit the most serious offences." That message, too, 
should resonate for the Canadian government, which seems intent on 
following the failed U.S. model, even as that country beats a retreat.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom