FUND PANEL ON SENTENCING

Given its financial bind, Alabama is in no position to be careless with the
taxpayers' money. But that doesn't mean that the state should fail to make
good investments in public policy, in particular the $377,000 proposed for
completion of the work of the Alabama Sentencing Commission.

That will be money well spent, and the Legislature should appropriate it
during this session.

The commission was established in 2000 to recommend changes in a profoundly
significant area of the judicial system. Sentencing practices have huge
implications, not only for those who are sentenced, but also for
law-abiding citizens and the prison system their taxes support.

A major concern is the disparity in sentences for similar crimes. Laws that
allow great gaps in sentencing - from one year to 10 years, for example -
can lead to fundamentally unjust punishments.

There can be no justification for widely varying punishments for essen
tially identical crimes. That flies in the face of the very notion of justice.

Another major concern is the lack of correlation between the time to which
an offender is sentenced and the actual time he or she serves. When an
offender is sentenced to a period in prison, but serves only a small
portion of that time, confidence in the integrity of the system is undermined.

If a two-year sentence is appropriate, a judge should be able to give such
a sentence and be confident that it will be served. A six-year sentence
that will prove to be only a two-year sentence rightly disturbs citizens.

The work of the commission has been hampered by the lack of a statewide
database on sentencing and by laws that keep some criminal records
confidential. It has asked the Legislature for funds to create the database
and for authorization to release those records.

The opportunity to definitively cite the problems in sentencing and propose
ways to correct them is well worth this relatively modest expenditure. It
is an excellent investment in public policy, with dividends to be reaped
for decades to come.