Pubdate: Sun, 04 Oct 2015
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2015 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

TOWARD SANER PRISON SENTENCES

The sentencing reform bill introduced in the Senate on Thursday falls 
far short of what is needed, but it is a crucial first step on the 
long path toward unwinding the federal government's decades-long 
reliance on prisons as the answer to every ill.

For starters, it is worth noting the bipartisan nature of this 
legislation. In a Senate that can't agree on the time of day, top 
Republican and Democratic senators - most notably Senator Charles 
Grassley, Republican of Iowa and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, 
as well as a longtime supporter of harsh sentencing laws - negotiated 
for months to produce a concrete set of fixes.

Among the most significant are those that would reduce 
mandatory-minimum sentences for many drug crimes. These sentences are 
jaw-droppingly long - from five years for a first offense up to life 
without parole for a third. The new bill would cut the life sentence 
to a 25-year minimum, and would cut the 20-year sentence for a second 
offense to 15 years.

These may seem like minor tweaks to pointlessly long sentences, and 
for the most part they are. But when half of all federal inmates are 
in for drug crimes, even small changes can make a real difference.

In addition, the bill would give federal judges more power to impose 
sentences below the mandatory minimum in certain cases, rather than 
being forced to apply a strict formula. This would shift some power 
away from prosecutors, who coax plea deals in more than 97 percent of 
cases, often by threatening defendants with outrageously long punishments.

Other provisions would give more inmates the chance to earn early 
release by participating in educational and other rehabilitative 
programming; seal or expunge juvenile records, so people are not 
burdened for life because of crimes they committed when they were 
young; and make it easier for older inmates to seek early release - a 
smart idea because they are by far the costliest to keep imprisoned 
and the least likely to commit new crimes.

Finally, and critically, many parts of the bill are retroactive, 
which means thousands of current federal inmates could benefit 
immediately. In particular, 6,500 prisoners are still serving time 
under an old law that punished crack-cocaine offenses far more 
severely than powder-cocaine offenses. When the law was altered to 
reduce the disparity in 2010, the change applied only to new cases, 
leaving thousands of inmates serving unjustly long sentences for no 
good reason.

There is still a long way to go. Four decades of extreme sentencing 
policies have deadened the public's sensitivity to what five years 
behind bars means, let alone 25 or more. Many people assumed that 
those serving long sentences must, by definition, be the worst 
offenders. But that has not been true; moreover, excessive sentences 
do little to deter crime. Studies suggest that certainty in 
punishment is more important to effective deterrence than the 
punishment's severity.

So much of American sentencing policy has been driven by irrational, 
fact-free scare-mongering. This new bill would, at the very least, 
provide volumes of data that could show - as other legislative 
efforts have already shown - that it's possible to reduce both prison 
populations and crime at the same time.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom