TOO MANY AMERICANS ARE BEHIND BARS

The absurd media frenzy over the perils of Paris Hilton shouldn't
obscure the serious issue this made-for-TV pseudo-event raises. That
issue is the astonishing number of Americans who are in prisons and
jails on any particular day.

At present there are about 2.4 million people behind bars at any one
time. We put people in prison at rates that range from about 300
percent to 800 percent higher than other developed nations. While some
of these people clearly ought to be behind bars, we also imprison
hundreds of thousands of Americans for non-violent drug offenses, and
other largely victimless crimes, at an immense social and economic
cost.

One reason so many Americans are behind bars is that being in prison,
like serving in the military, or not being able to see a doctor if
you're sick, is one of those things that rarely happen to the people
who decide issues such as how many people ought to be in prison, or if
we should go to war, or if we should guarantee health insurance for
all Americans.

A nice example of this mentality is provided by a column in The
Washington Post, in which a fancy Washington lawyer argues that Lewis
"Scooter" Libby shouldn't go to jail, despite being convicted of lying
to a grand jury about his role in a series of events that has plunged
the nation into a disastrous war.

According to William Otis, who among other things has been involved in
crafting the federal sentencing guidelines that have condemned so many
non-violent drug offenders to serve barbarically long sentences,
sending Libby to prison at all "would be an injustice to a person who,
though guilty in this instance, is not what most people would, or
should, think of as a criminal."

With all due respect to William Otis, Esq., you really can't make this
stuff up. Otis doesn't even bother to deny that Libby lied under oath
to a federal grand jury about matters involving the gravest issues of
national security. But to Otis and -- to judge from the pleas now
issuing from various corners of the Washington establishment -- many
others among the Georgetown-cocktail-party circuit, this isn't the
kind of thing they think of as being worthy of even a single day in
jail.

After all, Libby comes from such a good family, and he went to all the
best schools (Philips Andover, Yale and Columbia Law, for heaven's
sake!). If he committed perjury and obstruction of justice, he must
have had an excellent -- one might even venture to guess a genuinely
noble and self-sacrificing -- reason for doing so.

I mean, it isn't as if he sold someone a few hundred dollars' worth of
marijuana (a crime that, because of the sentencing guidelines Otis
helped draft, recently sent Weldon Angelos, a man with no criminal
record, to federal prison for the next 55 years).

Nor did he, at the age of 17, receive consensual oral sex from a
15-year-old girl, while residing in the great state of Georgia -- a
crime that has garnered high-school honors student Genarlow Wilson a
10-year prison sentence.

No, all Libby did was lie under oath about some details of a campaign
to smear opponents of the Iraq war. To such media luminaries as Time's
Joe Klein, the whole idea of imprisoning Libby is offensive: "Do we
really want to spend our tax dollars keeping Scooter Libby behind
bars?" Klein asks.

This question, again, is being asked in a nation that has some 2.4
million people behind bars -- a large proportion of whom committed
crimes that were less morally reprehensible, and almost infinitely
less damaging to the nation, than Libby's lies.

But to Joe Klein, Libby just doesn't "look" like a criminal. Somebody
- -- perhaps Paris Hilton -- should remind Klein that looks aren't
everything.

Paul F. Campos is a law professor at the University of
Colorado.