Pubdate: Sun, 16 Aug 2015
Source: Buffalo News (NY)
Copyright: 2015 The Buffalo News
Contact: http://drugsense.org/url/GXIzebQL
Website: http://www.buffalonews.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/61
Author: Clive Crook, Clive Crook is a Bloomberg View columnist.

Criminal Justice

MASS INCARCERATION IS NOT WORST PROBLEM OF U.S. SYSTEM

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.

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. 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.

Ending the war on drugs would make a big difference to the number of 
federal prisoners - but most of the incarcerated are in state 
prisons. Keeping fewer of them locked up would hardly dent the 
states' head count.

Handing down long sentences 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 if 
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.

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 nation 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 - 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