TOO MANY PRISONERS PLEASE COPY AND DISTRIBUTE DrugSense FOCUS Alert #374 - Friday, 11 July 2008 Washington Post editorials are read by a large majority of federal elected officials and their staff who work inside the D.C. beltway. Please write a letter to the editor about the editorial below. The average published letter the newspaper prints is about 200 words. About one in ten letters printed is in the 300 word range. Even if your letter is not printed, every letter sent sends a signal to the Washington Post editorial board that you think this issue is important. Contact: Pubdate: Fri, 11 Jul 2008 Source: Washington Post (DC) Page: A16 Copyright: 2008 The Washington Post Company TOO MANY PRISONERS States Should Stop Warehousing Nonviolent Offenders. TWO REPORTS by the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics show that the rate of growth in the prison and jail populations of the United States has slowed slightly but that the country still has the dubious distinction of being the largest jailer in the world. As of June 30, 2007, the country held roughly 2.3 million people behind bars, either in local or state jails or in federal prisons. The cost of housing and caring for inmates has been astronomical, an estimated $55 billion annual expense for taxpayers, according to the Pew Center on the States. The bloated number of inmates has been particularly painful for states, some of which have been forced to cut spending for higher education to fund corrections programs. As a result, California is considering an overhaul of its prison policies, as are Kentucky, Mississippi, Rhode Island and South Carolina. This fiscal crisis should be a wake-up call for all states. Tough sentences for murder, rape and the like are unquestionably necessary and contributed to a drop in such crimes over the past two decades. But prisons should be focused on holding the most dangerous criminals rather than on warehousing nonviolent, first-time offenders. States should consider, as New Jersey is, redirecting nonviolent, first-time drug offenders to rehabilitation programs. Like California, states should also debate early release for the most well-behaved inmates who have no violence in their records -- an approach that provides an incentive for good behavior. And states should consider reducing harsh penalties for nonviolent drug offenses. Some states are considering eliminating parole and thus saving the cost of employing agents to provide the supervision. They should be careful; oversight of recently released prisoners can be critical in keeping them on track. On a national level, Congress should continue to press ahead with legislation to reduce the sentencing disparity between convictions for crack and powder cocaine; the guidelines call for a person convicted of possessing five grams of crack cocaine to serve the same mandatory minimum sentence as someone caught with 500 grams of powder cocaine. The disparity has, among other things, led to a disproportionate number of African Americans behind bars for possession of relatively small quantities of cocaine. Modest reductions in the federal sentencing guidelines for crack have brought some balance to the penalties, but more needs to be done. Additional suggestions for writing LTEs are at our Media Activism Center: http://www.mapinc.org/resource/#guides PLEASE SEND US A COPY OF YOUR LETTER Please post a copy of your letter or report your action to the sent letter list ( ) if you are subscribed, or by emailing a copy to if you are not subscribed. Your letter will then be forwarded to the list so others may learn from your efforts. Subscribing to the Sent LTE list ( ) will help you to review other sent LTEs and perhaps come up with new ideas or approaches as well as keeping others aware of your important writing efforts. To subscribe to the Sent LTE mailing list see http://www.mapinc.org/lists/index.htm#form Prepared by: The MAP Media Activism Team www.mapinc.org/resource =.

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