Pubdate: Fri, 21 Aug 2015
Source: Albuquerque Journal (NM)
Copyright: 2015 Albuquerque Journal
Contact:  http://www.abqjournal.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/10
Author: Clive Crook, Bloomberg News

JUSTICE SYSTEM CRISIS IS IN THE PLEA BARGAINS

Prosecutors Get Too Much Power As They Stack Charges and Threaten Long Terms

The new consensus that something is wrong with American criminal 
justice is welcome. The amazing number of people in prison - a 
measure on which, adjusting for population, no other nation comes 
close - is indeed a sign that the U.S. system is broken.

It's good that the will to fix it seems to be growing.

Yet dwelling too much on that one statistic is unwise. There's a 
danger of missing the point.

Consider, for instance, the idea that the leading cause of mass 
incarceration is long prison sentences handed down to nonviolent drug 
offenders. President Barack Obama has called this the "real reason" 
that so many people are in prison. Not so. The Urban Institute just 
released a web tool that lets you see the effect on incarceration 
figures of state-by-state changes in prosecution and sentencing 
practices. As Erik Eckholm notes in the New York Times, fewer and/or 
shorter prison terms for nonviolent drug offenders help a lot less 
than you've been told.

Bloomberg View's editors recently criticized this and other aspects 
of the president's comments about incarceration.

Ending the war on drugs would make a big difference to the number of 
federal prisoners - but most of the incarcerated are in state, not 
federal, prisons. (In 2013, state prisons held 1,270,800 people; 
federal prisons only 215,000; another 731,200 were in local jails.)

Drug offenders make up a much smaller share of the state prison 
population. Keeping fewer of them locked up would hardly dent the 
states' head count.

Handing down long terms in prison for nonviolent drug offenders is 
grossly unjust, and ought to stop - but not because it's the main 
cause of overcrowded prisons. Those sentences would be grossly unjust 
even if the prisons were half-empty.

For the same reason, you ought to recoil when a politician argues 
that justice reform is necessary because keeping people in prison is 
expensive. If justice is served by keeping people in prison for 
decades, the cost is money well spent. When it's unjust, the cost is 
irrelevant - a secondary issue at best.

I've argued previously that the U.S. criminal justice system is a 
national disgrace. Sentences are indeed often savage, and at any rate 
far longer than needed to punish and effectively deter - but, bad as 
they may be, they aren't the system's most evil aspect. What would 
that be? The U.S. has all but abolished the jury trial. It has 
enshrined the repugnant practice of plea-bargaining, which equips 
prosecutors with terrible and largely unchecked powers of coercion.

Charge-stacking, mandatory minimum sentences, and the eagerness of 
legislators to criminalize as much behavior as possible - all cause 
for dismay in their own right - compound the offense.

If you set out to design a system that would empower the state and 
its law-enforcement officials to destroy whomever they set out to 
destroy, guilty or innocent, you could hardly improve on this.

Where was the Constitution while legislators and the law-enforcement 
complex were annulling the most basic and essential liberties?

Good question. In all this, courts have meekly acquiesced.

Mass incarceration should indeed be a cause of national shame - but 
it sure isn't the only thing wrong with American criminal justice.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom