Pubdate: Sun, 09 Sep 2001
Source: Observer, The (UK)
Section: International
Copyright: 2001 The Observer
Contact:  http://www.observer.co.uk/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/315
Author: Peter Beaumont

AMERICA LOSES TASTE FOR 'ZERO TOLERANCE'

States Find That Draconian Laws Don't Cut Crime.

The United States, notorious for its massive prison population, draconian 
sentencing and enthusiasm for capital punishment, is quietly abandoning its 
appetite for the toughest penal policies in the developed world.

States across a nation that fired British politicians of both Left and 
Right with an enthusiasm for 'zero tolerance', boot camps for delinquent 
juveniles, electronic tagging and 'three strikes, you're out' laws are 
giving up on their most controversial penal policies.

They now favour better community policing and treatment - rather than jail 
- - for drug addicts, who make up a huge percentage of the prison population.

Details of the creeping liberalisation have emerged as official figures 
show a big fall in executions for the second year running. Forty-eight 
people have been executed so far this year, down 27 per cent from this time 
last year. With 14 executions scheduled, this year's total could be down 30 
per cent on 1999, when 98 were put to death.

Most significant has been the decline in executions in President Bush's 
state of Texas, and also in Virginia. This year Texas has put 12 people to 
death, compared with 40 last year. Virginia has executed one inmate, 
compared with eight executed in 2000 and 14 in 1999.

A 20-year trend towards ever tougher sentences is apparently in reverse. 
There is evidence the states with the toughest penal policies have been no 
more successful in fighting crime than those with more humane regimes.

In the past 12 months four states - Louisiana, Connecticut, Indiana and 
North Dakota - have abandoned mandatory minimum sentencing, which made 
criminals serve long sentences without the possibility of parole.

Other states - including New York, Georgia, Idaho, Alabama and New Mexico - 
are re-evaluating state laws to reduce prison populations, which quadrupled 
in the US between 1970 and 1995.

Most surprising is the reform in Louisiana - whose prison system has a 
brutal reputation. In six years since the introduction of mandatory minimum 
sentencing, its prison population has jumped by 50 per cent, while state 
prison expenditure has risen by 70 per cent.

A new law - supported by a right-wing Republican, Governor Mike Foster, and 
a Democratic senator, Donald Cravins - eliminates mandatory prison terms 
for crimes such as burglary, minor drug possession, fraud, prostitution and 
obscenity.

'We had half the population in prison,' Cravins told the New York Times 
last week, 'and the other half watching them. We were pouring money into a 
bottomless pit.'

The reappraisal of sentencing follows a decade-long decline in the number 
of crimes logged by the FBI's annual survey, the Uniform Crime Report .

The change in the US political landscape over high levels of incarceration 
- - some two million Americans are in jail - comes as the annual prison bill 
has reached $30 billion (UKP 20bn) during an economic slowdown.

A significant change in penal policy is emerging in California, the state 
responsible for introducing the 'three strikes, you're out' policy that 
gave mandatory life sentences to offenders on their third conviction.

According to recent research by the Sentencing Project in Washington, the 
biggest resistance to the law is from within the judicial system.

Introduced in 1994 by the Governor at that time, Pete Wilson, it was touted 
as the solution to the problem of the most serious, habitual and repeat 
offenders that by 31 May this year had seen more than 50,000 offenders 
admitted to prison. While the crime rate in California has declined, other 
states without a 'three strikes' law have seen a similar decline.

Marc Mauer, one of the authors of the Sentencing Project's report on 
California's 'three strikes' law, told The Observer: 'Practitioners in the 
criminal justice system, the public and politicians are all changing their 
outlooks.

'President Clinton positioned himself as being tough on crime, meaning 
there was little difference between Democrats and Republicans on the issue. 
But in last year's presidential campaign we heard very little about crime.'

In California, says Mauer, opposition to the 'three strikes' law is led 
from the legal establishment. 'It is being chipped away by prosecutors and 
judges who don't want to use it.'

Mauer believes the decline in executions is linked to nervousness among 
practitioners within the judicial system following a number of cases of 
innocent men on death row being released following DNA tests that proved 
their innocence.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom