Pubdate: Mon, 03 Aug 2015
Source: Dallas Morning News (TX)
Copyright: 2015 The Dallas Morning News, Inc.
Contact: http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/send-a-letter/
Website: http://www.dallasnews.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/117

THE PRISON TRAP

Both Parties Are Right to Call for Sentencing Reform

The U.S. prison gulag is the bitter fruit of the grotesquely 
expensive war on drugs and decades of reflexive but counterproductive 
tough-on-crime policies.

The truth is this: Our federal and state prisons incarcerate people 
at a higher rate than all other major nations - well beyond rates in 
Russia and China and those under regimes widely regarded as backward 
and oppressive.

With 5 percent of the world's population, the United States holds 
about a quarter of the global prison population.

It's against this reality that leaders of both parties in Congress 
have signaled a willingness to work together to temper federal 
sentencing laws. As The New York Times reported last week, House 
Speaker John Boehner has lent his voice to the growing call for 
sentencing reform on the federal level.

"We've got a lot of people in prison, frankly, that don't really in 
my view need to be there," Boehner said.

Bipartisan work to address this national embarrassment is overdue in 
Washington, and it's good to hear members of both major parties 
outline the same general goals, including reducing mandatory minimum 
sentences in federal courts.

Left-right coalitions in many states, including Texas, have been 
exploring ways to unravel tough-on-crime laws from the 1980s and '90s 
that caused prison populations to balloon. In Texas, where the number 
of prisoners tripled in one decade, leaders across the political 
spectrum have questioned the practice of warehousing nonviolent 
offenders - many for drug possession alone - at terrific cost to taxpayers.

The federal prison system has grown ninefold since 1980, though it 
dipped slightly at the end of 2013, for the first time in 33 years. 
Still, federal lockups hold about 14 percent of the nation's 
prisoners, and the House speaker attests that the number is out of 
whack. That's progress of a sort.

Republican interest in sentencing reform stems not just from the 
party's penurious inclinations, given the high cost of housing 
prisoners for marginal gain. The GOP's libertarian streak is also 
making common cause with liberal Democrats over constitutional 
questions involving individuals vs. the power of government.

It's hard to brag about being the world's leading democracy when the 
nation is also the world's leading jailer.

There is, of course, a seamy racial element to the U.S. incarceration 
picture. The Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that as of the end 
of 2013, black men 25 to 39 were imprisoned at rates at least 2.5 
times greater than Hispanic men and six times greater than white men. 
Chalk that up in part to the war on drugs and how low-income 
Americans have been caught up in it at disproportionate levels.

As President Barack Obama said recently, in touring the federal 
prison in El Reno, Okla., his youthful dalliances with illegal drugs 
might have landed him behind bars, too, had he not come from a 
background of some privilege and means.

The nation needs to do better than foster a permanent underclass and 
keep it under lock and key.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom