JUDGES DECRY MANDATORY MINIMUM SENTENCES
"I Resent The Fact That Congress Has Forced Me To Do This," Said One Judge
When Imposing Sentence.

Sending a 20-year-old to prison for 10 years for selling crack
cocaine, Connecticut Judge Alan Nevas erupted in indignation in court.

"The sentence is one of the unfairest I have ever had to impose," he
told the defendant. "I don't excuse your conduct. You deserve to go to
jail. But 10 years is absolutely outrageous and I resent the fact that
Congress has forced me to do this."

Nevas was summing up the views of other judges, including Supreme
Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist, that the mandatory minimum
sentences drawn up over the past decade in get-tough-on-crime laws
have created a judiciary monster.

The national crime rate has been dropping for seven years, yet more
Americans are going to jail than ever before. Despite plummeting
robbery and homicide statistics na tionwide, the United States is
second only to Russia in the proportion of its population it has locked up.

In the wake of more than a decade of stringent and inflexible crime
statutes handed down from Capitol Hill, there are almost 2 million
Americans in prison, and the states and the federal government are
spending $ 31 billion a year on corrections.

Rehnquist and Attorney General Janet Reno, backed by an array of
judges and advocacy groups, have called for a reassessment of
mandatory minimum sentences.

There is also a growing grass-roots movement in some states to "catch
them, treat them and test them" as an alternative to automatically
jailing drug offenders at all levels. In Arizona, voters twice
approved an initiative substituting treatment for automatic
incarceration, and the Missouri legislature recently passed a bill
encouraging judges to order community service, treatment and victim
restitution instead of jail in certain drug cases.

"The idea is not to be soft on crime, but smart on corrections," said
Missouri State Sen. Harold Caskey, the bill's sponsor, who
acknowledged that the legislation was meant to reduce the state's
prison population.

"We have to do something about this orgy of incarceration," said Marc
Mauer, deputy director of the Sentencing Project, a non-profit group
urging treatment instead of jail for some narcotics offenses.

According to Justice Department statistics, the number of prisoners
nationwide has more than tripled, from 500,000 to 1.8 million, over
the past 20 years. Of that number, 1.1 million were locked up for
non-violent crimes, most of them drug-driven.

"The law of unintended consequences" was how Rehnquist described what
has happened in the wake of the mandatory minimum sentences designed
to demonstrate that Congress was not soft on crime.

Such sentences are the result of laws passed in the 1980s forcing
judges to impose fixed terms on offenders convicted of crimes
involving drugs and certain gun offenses. The federal mandatory
minimums are determined by the amount of drugs - for example, a
10-year sentence is imposed for possession of 1,000 marijuana plants,
while 5 grams of crack cocaine will send a defendant to jail for five
years.

"These mandatory minimums impose unduly harsh punishment for
first-time offenders and have led to an inordinate increase in the
prison population," said Rehnquist.

Bob Weiner, a spokesman for Gen. Barry McCaffrey, commander of the
White House war on drugs, said that reduction of the prison population
by 250,000 is "the guts" of a new White House policy to be announced
later this year. McCaffrey warned recently that prisons were becoming
a "drug gulag" as a result of the rising population of narcotics offenders.

As concern increases about legislative overreaction to drug crime,
states are taking a fresh look at mandatory minimum sentences. In
several states, such as Arizona, Oklahoma, Michigan and Connecticut,
commissions have been set up to rethink criminal codes. Michigan last
year rolled back its mandatory minimum life sentence for
drug-dealing.

Judges around the country are indignant about what many of them see as
the handcuffing of the judiciary. Asserted Supreme Court Justice
Anthony Kennedy, "Judges should not have their sentencing discretion
controlled."

Judge Leon Higginbotham of the 3rd U.S. Court of Appeals warned, "We
must remember we are not sentencing widgets or robots, but human
beings. Defendants should be sentenced within the spectrum of what
most judges would consider fair and reasonable."

The personal impact of mandatory sentencing was gauged by the reaction
of Julie Stewart, who launched a crusade after her brother was
sentenced to five years in federal prison without parole for
possession of 37 marijuana plants.

She quit her public-relations job and founded Families Against
Mandatory Minimums, a Washington-based group that now has 28 chapters
in 21 states. One of its goals, according to Stewart, is to make sure
that "punishment fits the crime."

The drug-driven explosion of the prison population has culminated
nationally in a $ 31 billion annual corrections budget - double that
of a decade ago. There are predictions that if the rate of increase in
the prison population does not decline, 3 million may be behind bars
by 2010, and the annual budget may reach $ 40 billion.

Meantime, states are spending more on building prisons than
universities. From 1987 to 1995, money spent by states for prisons
rose by 30 percent while expenditures for universities dropped by 19
percent.

It costs less than $ 6,000 a year to keep a child in a public school,
but about $ 22,000 to keep an inmate behind bars, according to the
Bureau of Justice Statistics. While more money has been poured into
the prison system, less has been spent on public education since 1995,
the first year when the cost of constructing cellblocks exceeded that
of building classrooms.

According to a recent report by the Justice Policy Institute,
California, which witnessed an eightfold increase in prison inmates
since 1979, had a 209 percent rise in corrections funding between 1984
and 1994. That reflected the cost of constructing 21 prisons compared
to one state university. The budget for Florida's corrections
department rose by $ 450 million between 1992 and 1994, and the
District of Columbia has more inmates in its prisons than students in
its university system.

Moreover, meeting the demands of the overflowing corrections system is
likely to require building a new facility nationally at least once a
month for the next 10 years. Dr. Allen Beck, a statistician with the
Department of Justice, pointed out that the recent drop in crime was
far outrun by the increase in the number of prisoners.

"There is no question that prisons are taking money from other
services and may be in danger of overwhelming state budgets," said
Beck, noting that the pace of the cost of corrections was rising
faster than expenditure on education, health, welfare and natural resources.

An estimated one in 150 Americans is now incarcerated, with one in 20
whites and one in four blacks facing the possibility of spending time
behind bars in their lifetime. Almost one in three African-American
males in the 20-29 age group is in prison, on probation or parole,
representing 74 percent of prison sentences for drug offenses.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the U.S. prison rate -
which for 50 years had held steady at 110 per 100,000 U.S. residents -
skyrocketed between 1980 and 1990 to 450 per 100,000 U.S. residents.
The bureau said that almost 80 percent of the increase was due to
narcotics arrests.

As counsel to the House Judiciary Committee, Eric Sterling helped
write the 1986 crime legislation that required the imposition of
mandatory minimum sentences that he now lobbies against. He is now
director of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, a non-profit group
focused on responding to drug offenses through treatment, not
imprisonment.

He stressed the importance of a growing grass-roots drive for
"restorative justice" but warned that few politicians would support
any action that gave the impression that they were "soft on crime."

"That's what they are all afraid of, and it may take a long time to
see real change in the mandatory minimums," said Sterling.

Sam Vagenas, director of the Arizona voter initiative group The People
Have Spoken, noted that a report by the state supreme court on the
results of probation and treatment instead of imprisonment showed 77
percent of offenders tested drug-free after completing the program. It
also was estimated as $ 2.6 million cheaper than putting them in prison.

"The trouble is that politicians are still hysterical about being seen
as soft on drugs. They are afraid to change the mandatory minimum laws
because they are afraid it will be politically unpopular," said Vagenas.

A study of mandatory sentences by the Rand Corp. suggested that the
problem was that the sentences did not specifically target high-level
drug dealers, and wound up netting too many "small fish."

As researcher Jonathan Caulkins put it, "If cutting drug consumption
and drug-related crime are the nation's prime drug control objectives,
then the mandatory minimum drug sentencing laws in force at the
federal level and in most states are not the way to get there."

The study contended that treatment was far more likely to remove an
offender from the drug market than prison.

States with highest prison populations

(As of June 30, 1998)

California 158,742

Texas 143,299

(Federal) 18,908

New York. 70,723

Florida 66,280

Ohio 49,289

Michigan 44,501

Illinois 42,140

Georgia 38,194

Pennsylvania 35,644

Highest incarceration rate

(Sentenced prisoners per 100,000 residents as of June 30,
1998)

Louisiana 709

Texas 700

Oklahoma 629

Mississippi 547

South Carolina 543

Nevada 529

Arizona 504

Alabama 501

Georgia 492

California 477

Excludes the Federal Bureau of Prisons and the District of
Columbia.

GRAPHIC: CHART (2), CHART: Source: U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics: (States
with; highest prison populations); CHART: U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics:
(High incarceration rate)