RIGID SENTENCING RULES WON'T CUT CRIME

If ever there were a golden moment to reform America's prison policy -- 2
million people incarcerated -- that time should be now.

The economy is booming, creating strong demand for workers, rehabilitated
convicts included. Crime rates are dropping rapidly. We're feeling a touch
of shame about leading the civilized world in prisoners.

It's true our prisons hold hundreds of thousands of dangerous individuals,
people convicted of quite heinous violent crimes. Even if a handful were
wrongly convicted, we're justifiably nervous about premature releases.

But behind bars, too, are lots of men (and increasingly women) caught
possessing or handling small amounts of drugs. Many now face years, often
decades, of incarceration for those infractions.

In California, more inmates are doing life -- their natural life -- for
marijuana possession than for murder, rape and robbery combined.

Here's a possible reform agenda:

. Overhaul sentencing. Decide who we're afraid of and who we're just mad at.
Imprison the proven criminals we have reason to fear. Find alternative
ways -- from halfway houses to community service to drug treatment -- to
chastise and then treat the rest.

Sentencing reform means doing away with mandatory sentencing. Legislatures
should write future sentencing guidelines focused less on punishment, more
on averting crime.

. Reinvent and reinvest in probation and parole. This idea's championed by
criminologist John DiIulio, who supported much of the '90s prison buildup.
Probation and parole fail, he notes, because officers have unrealistic
caseloads and are paid poorly. Recidivism could likely be cut way back by
investing adequate funds, cutting caseloads and then judging various
probation and parole practices by their actual effectiveness in stopping
repeat crime.

. Stop chasing drug addicts. America's massive "war on drugs" is an abysmal
failure. Even with multibillion-dollar budgets and military power, it can't
interdict more than 1 percent or so of the illegal drugs flowing into the
United States. It rarely catches the big dealers; usually it snares
small-time operators, very poor people often addicted and personally
maladjusted. Then it throws them into the slammer for an obscene number of
years.

Which drugs are truly dangerous, to users and society? Tobacco takes a
yearly death toll of 390,000 Americans, alcohol 80,000, cocaine 2,200,
heroin 2,000, aspirin 2,000 and marijuana zero (no proven deaths, at least
on its own). Combine all illegal drugs and the direct death toll is under
5,000 Americans a year, according to National Institute of Drug Abuse
reports.

The danger to society isn't the illegal drugs; it's chasing down their
users, criminalizing addiction.

. Treat drug addicts -- don't make them wait months, years for care as we do
now. Studies show people who get treatment are four times less likely to
commit another drug crime. Rand Corp. research calculated that spending on
treatment reduces serious crime 15 times more than expanding mandatory
prison terms.

While we've poured billions into new prisons, most drug treatment programs
remain woefully underfunded. For the $450,000 it typically costs to arrest,
convict and imprison a drug dealer for five years, drug treatment or
education can be provided for about 200 people, according to the Drug Reform
Coordination Network.

. Go after root causes. Why do we have serious crime, drug affliction? Some
degree of bestial behavior is a constant among humans. But it's also true,
as prison hard-liner DiIulio has noted, that America records 1 million
substantiated cases of child abuse yearly. Sixteen percent of our children
are impoverished, 40 percent are without a father in the home.

Neighborhood, church, school-based programs can help some of these young
people and need much more serious support. Quality community policing can
make a difference. Faith-based efforts, including the "restorative justice"
programs pushed by Charles Colson and others, open a window on helping
people already caught in crime's web.

America could, in short, reduce its crime problem dramatically, just by
caring to make the extra effort. What we now know, conclusively, is that
more prisons are not the answer.