Pubdate: Mon, 23 Nov 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

CUT SENTENCES FOR NONVIOLENT FELONS

Now that Congress is within sight of passing the most significant 
federal sentencing reforms in a generation, it's worth taking a 
closer look at where the legislation falls short.

The main driver of the federal prison population is, by far, the 
dramatic increase in the time people spend behind bars - 
specifically, those convicted of drug offenses, who account for 
nearly half of the nation's 199,000 federal inmates. From 1988 to 
2012, the average time served for drug crimes more than doubled in 
length, according to a new report by the Pew Charitable Trusts. That 
increase in the length of drug sentences comes at a great expense: an 
estimated $1.5 billion each year, based on how much it costs to keep 
a federal inmate behind bars.

The new sentencing-reform bills now moving through the Senate and 
House would help reduce some of the longest mandatory-minimum 
sentences, including ending the use of life without parole for drug 
crimes, and would give judges more power to impose a shorter sentence 
when the facts of a case warrant it.

But these fixes do not reach to the heart of the problem, which is 
that the vast majority of federal drug offenders serving outsize 
sentences are in for low-level, nonviolent crimes, and have no 
serious history of violence.

More than half of the current drug-offender population has no violent 
history at all, according to a new analysis by the Urban Institute 
and the Charles Colson Task Force on Federal Corrections. Less than 
14 percent were sentenced for using or threatening to use violence, 
or directing its use. And only 14 percent were sentenced for having a 
high-level or leadership role in a drug operation, the study found.

Virtually all of these convictions involve drug trafficking, but that 
can mean anything from being a kingpin to being a drug mule driving a 
truck to a street-corner seller. Prosecutors often rely on the threat 
of mandatory-minimum sentences against low-level players to go after 
the leaders of a drug operation. This may sound like a useful 
strategy, but federal research shows that other reductions in drug 
sentences, like the 2010 law that scaled back punishments for 
crack-cocaine offenses, did not make defendants less likely to 
cooperate with law enforcement.

Nor does it make sense to argue that long sentences for low-level, 
nonviolent offenders benefit public safety, since there is evidence 
that sentence length has little effect on crime rates.

Making any real dent in the federal prison population will require 
broader reforms than those Congress is currently considering. The 
Urban Institute has calculated that halving the sentences being 
served by current and future drug inmates would reduce the federal 
prison population by only 18 percent over existing projections by 2023.

A critical fix Congress could make right now would be to change the 
law so that a person's sentence is determined by his role in a drug 
operation, and not by the entire amount of drugs found in that 
operation, which is a poor measure of culpability.

One version of the sentencing reform legislation, introduced in the 
House by Jim Sensenbrenner, Republican of Wisconsin, and Robert 
Scott, Democrat of Virginia, would have addressed this issue squarely 
by applying many mandatory minimum sentences only to the leaders of a 
drug organization. But that smart idea was heavily watered down in 
the bills passed by the Senate and House Judiciary Committees in 
recent days. Congress should resurrect this sensible provision, which 
would go a long way toward bringing some basic fairness and 
rationality back into the nation's horribly skewed drug laws.
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