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.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom