PRISON TERMS CHANGE CRIME FIGHTERS

ARLINGTON, Va. - They were high public officials, tough on crime,
but they say they discovered the humanity of the prison population
and the error of their crime-fighting ways when they became
prisoners themselves.

"If we could get every public official in prison for a few months, the
policy would change greatly," said Webster Hubbell, once associate
attorney general in the Justice Department, now an ex-con from the
Whitewater affair facing still more legal jeopardy.

Former Pennsylvania Attorney General Ernie Preate Jr. and former
California Republican leader Pat Nolan joined Hubbell at a meeting
Saturday of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, representing family
members serving long prison terms set during a wave of legislative
efforts to crack down on crime.

Preate, once a hard-nosed advocate of mandatory sentences, spent a
year in federal prison for mail fraud and emerged in 1996 with the
belief that not only was his crime wrong, but so had been his
treatment of criminals. "I was the quintessential prosecutor," he
said. "My specialty was death penalty work."

Now, he said, "we're on a collision course with social catastrophe"
unless more is done to rehabilitate criminals and find alternatives to
prison for the 65 percent of inmates locked up for nonviolent crime.

Nolan saw his career in the California assembly turn to dust when he
was convicted of racketeering and sent to federal prison for 29 months
and a halfway house for four.

He recalled his cold response as a lawmaker when he was asked to
support workers' compensation coverage for prisoners and how his
attitude changed after he landed in a cell with a young drug criminal,
a writer of bogus checks, a leader of the Los Angeles riots and a
member of the Hell's Angels.

"These were my brothers," he said. "For the first time I saw them as
human beings."

Hubbell, a former law partner of Hillary Rodham Clinton, spent 21
months in federal custody, some of it in a halfway house, for tax
evasion and mail fraud. Still subject to more charges arising from
independent counsel Kenneth Starr's Whitewater investigation, he was
circumspect.

"Using the criminal process for political purposes is wrong," he said,
explaining he was not talking about his case specifically. Asked by
one of the many sympathetic members of the audience whether Starr
should be criminally investigated, he said pointedly: "I don't want
any more investigations."

A federal appeals court reinstated a tax evasion case against Hubbell
in January, stemming from hundreds of thousands of dollars paid to him
by friends of the Clintons in 1994 after he left the Justice
Department. Starr theorized the payments were meant to keep Hubbell
quiet during the Whitewater probe.

The three fallen public figures at the conference were not subjected
to mandatory sentences, a device used more for drug and gun offenses
than white-collar crime, and their incarceration was more comfortable
than that experienced by people doing hard time.

He faulted himself for not doing enough while in the Justice
Department to stand against the tide moving in favor of tougher
sentences and an expanded list of federal crimes.

Congress and many states have enacted laws requiring minimum sentences
since mandatory terms began coming into favor in the 1970s, but legal
experts say a move to revert is growing. Michigan last year relaxed a
law that mandated life in prison, with no parole, for anyone
delivering, or intending to deliver, 650 grams, about 1.4 pounds, of
cocaine or heroin.