FAIR SHAKE REPORT: MINORITIES HARDEST HIT BY MANDATORY SENTENCING

Weekend reports indicate that the U.S. prison population, led by the state
of Texas, is down somewhat this year compared to last year.

That small decline comes after years of explosive growth in the nation's
prison population and prison numbers.

That's been very expensive growth, incidentally, because prisons are not
exactly cheap or easy to run.

The growth has come about mainly because state legislatures and Congress
decided to pre-empt the courts and juries and set mandatory sentence
lengths for specific crimes. Our lawmakers decided the folks on the front
lines weren't tough enough on crime. (Or was it simply that talking and
acting tough on crime was a fashionable way to get elected or re-elected?)

Now, advocates of mandatory sentencing, the poster child of the nation's
very expensive drug war, are backing off, according to reports in the Wall
Street Journal among other publications.

Even President Bush is said to be having second thoughts about mandatory
sentences, and the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration has likewise
gone on record wondering aloud whether they are worth what they cost. And
the U.S. Sentencing Commission is also planning to look at some of its
guidelines, perhaps to relax them.

What's going on here?

Well, it would be cynical to suggest that the price of incarceration has
just gotten too high to handle. Besides, that would probably be the wrong
thing to say because there seems to be no ceiling at all on what we'll
spend to put people behind bars as opposed to, say, getting them educated.

No, it may actually be the case that a sense of fairness has come into play
here. When you look at who is behind bars and who isn't and who gets the
hard time and who doesn't, you see that it's minorities who are hardest hit
by mandatory sentences.

That's been especially true with sentences for offenses involving cocaine.
As The Journal pointed out last week in a piece by Gary Fields, the
sentences for crimes involving crack are tougher than those for powder
cocaine. And those incarcerated for crack offenses are more likely to be
minorities.

What the federal government does about mandatory sentencing makes a
difference to the states because the feds tend to set the tone in such matters.

But it's the states where most of the money is spent on keeping people in
prison at huge expense, and it's in the states where the debate over
sentencing has to take place if it's to have much effect on taxpayers and
on those accused of crimes -- and those who might use the money if it
weren't tied up in bars and guards.