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.