Pubdate: Sun, 11 Aug 2013
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2013 The New York Times Company
Contact: http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/lettertoeditor.html
Website: http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Nicholas D. Kristof
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?199 (Mandatory Minimum Sentencing)

HELP THY NEIGHBOR AND GO STRAIGHT TO PRISON

IF you want to understand all that is wrong with America's criminal 
justice system, take a look at the nightmare experienced by Edward Young.

Young, now 43, was convicted of several burglaries as a young man but 
then resolved that he would turn his life around. Released from 
prison in 1996, he married, worked six days a week, and raised four 
children in Hixson, Tenn.

Then a neighbor died, and his widow, Neva Mumpower, asked Young to 
help sell her husband's belongings. He later found, mixed in among 
them, seven shotgun shells, and he put them aside so that his 
children wouldn't find them.

"He was trying to help me out," Mumpower told me. "My husband was a 
pack rat, and I was trying to clear things out."

Then Young became a suspect in burglaries at storage facilities and 
vehicles in the area, and the police searched his home and found the 
forgotten shotgun shells as well as some stolen goods. The United 
States attorney in Chattanooga prosecuted Young under a federal law 
that bars ex-felons from possessing guns or ammunition. In this case, 
under the Armed Career Criminal Act, that meant a 15-year minimum sentence.

The United States attorney, William Killian, went after Young - even 
though none of Young's past crimes involved a gun, even though Young 
had no shotgun or other weapon to go with the seven shells, and even 
though, by all accounts, he had no idea that he was violating the law 
when he helped Mrs. Mumpower sell her husband's belongings.

In May, a federal judge, acknowledging that the case was Dickensian 
but saying that he had no leeway under the law, sentenced Young to 
serve a minimum of 15 years in federal prison. It didn't matter that 
the local authorities eventually dismissed the burglary charges.

So the federal government, at a time when it is cutting education 
spending, is preparing to spend $415,000 over the next 15 years to 
imprison a man for innocently possessing seven shotgun shells while 
trying to help a widow in the neighborhood. And, under the law, there 
is no early release: Young will spend the full 15 years in prison.

This case captures what is wrong with our "justice" system: We have 
invested in mass incarceration in ways that are crushingly expensive, 
break up families and are often simply cruel. With less than 5 
percent of the world's population, the United States has almost 
one-quarter of the world's prisoners.

This hasn't always been the case, but it is the result of policies 
such as mandatory minimum sentences since the 1970s.

In 1978, the United States had 307,000 inmates in state and federal 
prisons. That soared to a peak of more than 1.6 million in 2009. 
Since then, the number of inmates has declined for three consecutive 
years to 1.57 million in 2012. The number of juveniles detained has 
also begun to drop since peaking in 2000, although the U.S. still 
detains children at a rate five times that of the next highest country.

In short, there's some hope that this American experiment in mass 
incarceration has been recognized as a failure and will be gradually 
unwound. Among the leaders in moving away from the old policies are 
blue states and red states alike, including New York and Texas. But 
America still has twice as many prisoners today as under President 
Ronald Reagan.

Almost everyone seems to acknowledge that locking up vast numbers of 
nonviolent offenders is a waste of money. California devotes $179,400 
to keep a juvenile in detention for a year, and spends less than 
$10,000 per student in its schools.

Granted, mass incarceration may have been one factor in reduced crime 
in the last couple of decades; there's mixed evidence. But, if so, 
the economic and social cost has been enormous - including the 
breakup of families and the increased risk that children of those 
families will become criminals a generation later.

There's also contrary evidence that incarceration, especially of 
young people, doesn't work well in preventing crime, especially for 
young people. One careful study of 35,000 young offenders by Anna 
Aizer and Joseph J. Doyle Jr. reached the startling conclusion that 
jailing juveniles leads them to be more likely to commit crimes as 
adults. Milder sentences, such as electronic monitoring and home 
detention, were actually more effective at preventing adult crime.

Alternatives to incarceration are both cheaper and more efficient. 
Youth Villages has an excellent record of working with troubled 
youngsters and their families, and of keeping them from committing 
crimes. So do some job-training and education programs. Mass 
incarceration has been particularly devastating for blacks and 
members of other minority groups, as well as for the poor generally. 
In this case, Edward Young is white.

Conservatives often argue that there is a link between family 
breakdown and cycles of poverty. They're right: Boys are more likely 
to get into trouble without a dad at home, and we have a major 
problem with the irresponsibility of young men who conceive babies 
but don't raise them.

We also have a serious problem with the irresponsibility of mass 
incarceration. When almost 1 percent of Americans are imprisoned (and 
a far higher percentage of men of color in low-income neighborhoods), 
our criminal justice system becomes a cause of family breakdown and 
contributes to the delinquency of a generation of children. And mass 
incarceration interacts with other government policies, such as the 
way the drug war is implemented, to have a disproportionate effect on 
African-Americans. Black men use marijuana at roughly the same rate 
as white men but are more than three times as likely to be arrested over it.

Young is particularly close to his children, ages 6 to 16. After back 
problems and rheumatoid arthritis left him disabled, he was a 
stay-at-home dad while his wife worked in a doctor's office. When the 
judge announced the sentence, the children all burst into tears.

"I can't believe my kids lose their daddy for the next 15 years," his 
wife, Stacy, told me. "He never tried to get a firearm in the 16 
years I was with him. It's crazy. He's getting a longer sentence than 
people who've killed or raped."

Young's lawyer, Christopher Varner, of Chattanooga, is appealing the 
sentence and says he is shaken by the outcome. "It's shocking," he 
says. "That's not what we do in this country."

I asked Killian, the United States attorney, why on earth he would 
want to send a man to prison for 15 years for innocently possessing 
seven shotgun shells. "The case raised serious public safety 
concerns," Killian said.

Oh.

The classic caricature of justice run amok is Inspector Javert in 
Victor Hugo's novel "Les Miserables," pursuing Jean Valjean for 
stealing bread for hungry children. In that case, Valjean knew that 
he was breaking the law; Edward Young had no idea.

Some day, Americans will look back and wonder at how we as a society 
could be much more willing to invest in prisons than in schools. They 
will be astonished that we sent a man to federal prison for 15 years 
for trying to help a widow.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom