GETTING TOUGH ON CRIME HAS DOWNSIDE, GROUP TOLD

Though it has been used by politicians for years as a popular vote-grabber,
the rhetoric that advocates "getting tough on crime" has helped sway the
nation's prison system away from reform and toward mere retribution.

And that, according to a panel of religious leaders and legal scholars, is
not true justice but a growing vindictiveness that pushes prisoners toward
non-human status in the eyes of the public and the prison system. Too
often, they said, minimum mandatory sentencing guidelines leave judges
little leeway in dispensing true justice by considering the particulars of
each case.

Speaking during Thursday's sessions of the annual Sunstone Symposium in
Salt Lake City, the panel examined how Judeo-Christian notions of justice
and mercy are often lost in the quest for political and economic expediency.

Marguerite Driessen, a professor of law at Brigham Young University,
previously worked for the U.S. Sentencing Commission, which draws up
federal guidelines designating the minimum length of prison time to be
imposed on those convicted of specific crimes.

"I give the system a D-plus when you consider whether the consequences
result in justice," she said of the guidelines. "The laws are not tailored
to make sure the consequences are imposed only as long as necessary. Even
if you repent and are a saint, the federal system doesn't care any more."

She said religious traditions hold that "God loves everyone and doesn't
believe that people don't have a chance to make it back. Yet our (criminal
justice) system is throwing a lot of people away for life."

Dee Rowland, director of the Peace and Justice Commission for the Catholic
Diocese of Salt Lake City, said the prison system was originally based on
"a moral vision of society" that has been lost in favor of "punishment that
fails to recognize prisoners as human beings."

Bishop Carolyn Tanner Irish, leader of Utah's Episcopal Diocese, said she
fears the current criminal justice system is structured in part "to support
the emerging prison industrial complex." The move toward privatizing
prisons and building them in rural areas is driven principally by
economics, she said.

Some 245 prisons have been built in rural areas in the past decade alone,
bringing a much-needed infusion of jobs and cash into areas where family
farming has become obsolete. "We imprison a greater percentage of our
population longer than any other civilization has ever done . . . . It's
very difficult to interrupt economic practices once they have been
established," and entire towns are now dependent on the local prison, with
many areas competing with each other to attract facilities once considered
undesirable.

Unlike minimum mandatory sentencing, life is not black and white, said the
Rev. Donald Graves, senior minister of the Church of Religious Science.

People punish others typically because they are afraid, he said, asking the
audience to consider "how much punishment has worked for you to change your
behavior or to make you conform to your society?" Truly restorative justice
"is very messy. It requires one-on-one contact, and you can't treat people
like they all came out of a Spam can."

U.S. District Court Judge Dale Kimball said minimum mandatory sentencing
"is basically indefensible in most cases," but pointed out that even court
systems that mete out discipline on a case-by-case basis are subject to
criticism.

The federal guidelines recently mandated that he send a first-time drug
offender to prison for a minimum of 10 years. "It was too long," he said
after talking with the offender's parents and struggling with the sentence.
"No one needs 10 years to see what they can make of their life."