ANOTHER ROUND AT FAILURE

Sentencing Laws Making Comeback

Here we go again.

Members of Congress are on the verge of passing more mandatory minimum
sentencing laws. After 20 years of failure on this issue, you would think
they had learned their lesson.

Mandatory minimum sentences force judges to deliver fixed sentences to
individuals convicted of a crime, regardless of mitigating factors. These
sentences have contributed to prison overcrowding, cost taxpayers millions,
failed to deter crimes and sent record numbers to prison.

The latest congressional misadventure into mandatory minimum sentencing
concerns an anti-gang bill passed recently by the House. Called "The Gang
Deterrence and Community Protection Act," it would federalize some crimes
associated with gang activity, narrow the definition of a gang and apply
mandatory minimum sentencing under federal law for some crimes committed by
gang members and juvenile offenders. It would also allow for the
incarceration of a disproportionate number of blacks and Latinos in the
coming years.

Mandatory minimums have a hideous track record.

In the 1980s, during the early days of the so-called war on drugs, the
federal government, followed by many states, passed mandatory minimum
sentencing laws to address the growing drug problem. As a result, thousands
of nonviolent low-level drug offenders -- most of them black or Latino --
received long prison sentences for possession of small quantities of
illegal drugs. The prison population exploded. Sadly, many offenders would
have been better served with treatment.

In 1986, the year Congress enacted mandatory minimum sentencing laws, the
average federal drug sentence for blacks was 11 percent higher than for
whites, according to the Drug Policy Alliance. Four years later, the
sentence disparity had grown to 49 percent.

Despite this massive incarceration of blacks and Latinos for nonviolent,
low-level drug offenses over the last 20 years, illegal drugs are still
readily available for purchase.

Just like the anti-drug mandatory minimum laws, the new anti-gang proposal
addresses only the supply side of the gang problem. It does not deal with
the demand. It fails to confront the root causes of why many individuals
join gangs in the first place, such as unemployment, lack of educational
opportunities and poverty.

Lawmakers should certainly take gang violence and gang activity seriously.
But mandatory minimum sentencing laws are not the ticket, as the track
record already shows.