Pubdate: Thu, 16 Jul 2015 Source: San Diego Union Tribune (CA) Copyright: 2015 Union-Tribune Publishing Co. Contact: http://www.utsandiego.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/386 Note: Seldom prints LTEs from outside it's circulation area. CRIME, PUNISHMENT AND JUSTICE The U.S. criminal-justice system needs close scrutiny, as President Obama said Tuesday in a speech to the NAACP convention in Philadelphia, to determine how much of how it operates actually creates injustice. Thankfully, a reform plan - one that starts with a retreat from flawed mandatory minimum sentences that warehouse prisoners who often are little threat to society appears to have a solid chance of winning support in Congress and resulting in real change. Sens. John Cornyn, R-Texas, Rand Paul, R-Tenn., Cory Booker, D-N.J., and Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., have all questioned rigid "three-strikes-and-you're-out" policies that have resulted in America locking up a much higher percentage of its people than any First World nation. So have two of the nation's heavyweight campaign donors the Koch brothers - as the president noted Tuesday. This makes it likely that we're finally going to have a much-needed debate about crime and punishment, and the need to have policies that are both rational and humane. Any such debate should start with the awareness that in virtually all modern societies crime is overwhelmingly concentrated among young men. If public safety is the goal, the mass warehousing of men in their 50s, 60s and 70s simply doesn't make sense. More than 20 percent of California's state prison population falls in this category. So why isn't there a broader understanding that such prisoners aren't likely to be a menace to society? Because prison-sentencing policies in California and in much of the nation are not driven by logic. Instead, they're driven by the public's desire for retribution and the enduring, unsubstantiated belief that judges are so likely to go easy on the bad guys that they must have no discretion in setting prison terms. But sentencing reform should only be the starting point. As Judge Alex Kozinski of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz have written for decades, in some ways our legal system amounts to a prison-industrial complex, streamlined to yield a product: inmates. In a recent essay for Georgetown's law journal, Kozinski - a Reagan appointee - cited an overreliance on often-unreliable eyewitness testimony, incentives for police officers and prosecutors to omit ambiguous or contrary evidence, and the unlikelihood of officers or prosecutors ever facing consequences for cutting corners or manipulating evidence. We don't have the expertise to judge whether Kozinski's assertion that the system is heavily tilted against criminal defendants goes too far. But he raises profoundly important questions and one doesn't have to look very hard in California to find law-enforcement practices that support his thesis. The routine use of civil forfeiture proceedings to seize assets from people who haven't been convicted of crimes is rationalized by some police chiefs and sheriffs because it helps their budgets. That's outrageous. So let's get on with the broad debate that the president wants and the nation needs. The status quo of our criminal justice system isn't just flawed. Parts of this status quo are harmful and parts are indefensible. - --- MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom