Pubdate: Sat, 25 Jul 2015
Source: Republican & Herald (PA)
Copyright: 2015 Pottsville Republican, Inc
Contact:  http://republicanherald.com
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1047
Note: Editorial from The Seattle Times

IT'S TIME TO OVERHAUL CRIMINAL- JUSTICE POLICY

President Barack Obama has seized on the righteous issue of mass 
incarceration for the final lap of his presidency. This one has a 
broad ideological and bipartisan coalition behind it, with Republican 
senators, governors and funders ( including the Koch brothers) linked 
with the likes of the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP.

But Obama is not going far enough.

Since the start of the war on drugs decades ago, the population in 
state and federal prisons has exploded by more than 500 percent. This 
is ruinously expensive - states' prison budgets tripled since 1990 - 
and explicitly unfair. The lifetime likelihood for a white male to go 
to prison is 1 in 17; for black men it is 1 in 3. The U. S. rate of 
incarceration is six times greater than China's and nearly 10 times 
greater than Germany's.

Obama's effort to swing criminal-justice policy back to rationality 
includes a review of solitary confinement in federal prisons and 
extending voting rights to felons. ...

Obama has rightly focused on the legacy of the war on drugs. In a 
speech to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored 
People last week, shortly after commuting sentences of 46 drug 
offenders, Obama said, "If you're a low-level drug dealer, or you 
violate your parole, you owe some debt to society. You have to be 
held accountable and make amends. But you don't owe 20 years. You 
don't owe a life sentence. That's disproportionate to the price that 
should be paid."

His administration should go farther. The U. S. Department of Justice 
could reform the outcomes it expects from the billions of dollars in 
grants it sends to states each year for law enforcement, focusing 
more on treatment and reduced recidivism than on arrests and drugs 
seized. It would send a powerful policy message to local and state 
law enforcement, and encourage innovative alternatives to the arrest- 
jail-release spin cycle.

And Obama should accept the request of some members of Congress and 
have his administration reclassify marijuana from the top tier of 
illegal drugs. Doing so would facilitate more statelevel experiments 
with legalization, and it would be consistent with Obama's stated 
belief that marijuana is no more dangerous than alcohol.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom