POLL: 60 PERCENT OF AMERICANS OPPOSE MANDATORY MINIMUM SENTENCES

Attitudes About One of the Toughest Crime Measures From the 1980s May
Be Changing.

Chicago - For two decades, politicians have worked hard to polish
their tough-on-crime credentials.

Now, though - at a time when concerns about crime are low, prison
populations are skyrocketing, and voters are more informed about how
sentencing laws play out - Americans may be starting to rethink one
of the toughest crime reforms from the 1980s: mandatory minimum
sentences for drug offenses.

In a new poll, some 60 percent of respondents opposed mandatory
minimums for nonviolent crimes, including a majority of both
Democrats and Republicans. Nearly 80 percent said the courts are best
qualified to determine sentences for crimes, and nearly 60 percent
said they'd be likely to vote for a politician who opposed mandatory
minimum sentences.

"The public is ahead of the politicians on this," says Julie Stewart,
president and founder of Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM),
which commissioned the poll and released a new report on the issue
Wednesday. "This is a message members of Congress haven't heard....
As a country we believe in individualized justice."

The current spate of mandatory minimums has its root in the crime
wave of the 1980s, when fears about crack cocaine, in particular, led
lawmakers to draft tougher measures to deter dealers.

Much attention in recent years has focused on the disparity between
the minimums meted out for crack cocaine - often connected with
African-American offenders and once believed to be more dangerous
than powder - and the powder form. Experts now say the two forms are
equally dangerous. Those possessing five grams of crack cocaine -
versus 500 grams of powder cocaine - face a mandatory minimum of five years.

Last year, the US Sentencing Commission got a reduction of some
sentencing guidelines for crack cocaine, sparking a controversy about
crack offenders made eligible for release, but the minimums remain the same.

Not everyone believes mandatory minimums should be changed. Attorney
General Michael Mukasey strongly opposed the efforts last year to
reduce sentences for crack offenders. And the Fraternal Order of
Police advocates mandatory minimums as an important deterrent to drug crimes.

"Whatever else you may try on the street by way of prevention and
intervention, individuals who ... violate the law need to know that
there are consequences," says Jim Pasco, executive director of the
FOP. "Nothing focuses the mind on consequences like knowing that
you're going to get, for instance, a five-year minimum sentence."

Ceding the power to judges wouldn't have the same effect, he argues.
"There wouldn't be mandatory minimums today if the discretion of
judges had gotten the job done."

But others say mandatory minimums take away discretion from the
person best able to weigh punishment. "The judge has all the facts
about an individual case, whereas the legislature is setting the
sentence guidelines in a vacuum," says James Alan Fox, a
criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston, MA.

FAMM's new report argues that there's no evidence mandatory minimums
have helped reduce drug crime, and in fact, often focuses
law-enforcement efforts on small-time players rather than drug
kingpins. It also argues that the sentences have imposed significant
costs on the system, by putting nonviolent offenders in jail longer
than appropriate.

"This isn't as volatile an issue as it was in the 1980s, and we're a
lot better educated than we were," says Molly Gill, the report's
author. She points to the first time Congress enacted mandatory
minimum sentences for drug crimes in 1951 with the Boggs Act - which
made no distinction between drug users and traffickers - and later
repealed them in 1970 when it was clear they weren't working.

Today, Ms. Gill sees two potential solutions: repealing the minimums
entirely, which would leave the sentencing guidelines in place but
allow for judicial discretion, or expanding the existing "safety
valve," which allows judges to disregard the minimums under certain criteria.