A PENALTY TOO STIFF

Taxpayers Foot the Bill for Unreasonable Drug Sentences

It's usually not anyone's place in Dallas to tell Tyler jurors what
to do or not to do in dealing with felons in their community. Smith
County's law-enforcement officials are not accountable to outsiders
on how they prosecute cases.

But here's the big "but": In sending defendants off to state prison,
every county pushes the incarceration cost onto the rest of us. It
costs roughly $50 a day to house offenders in Texas prisons.

And so it got our attention big time when a jury in Tyler sentenced a
man to 35 years recently for possessing 4.6 ounces of marijuana, a
sentence that tests our tolerance for prosecution of drug laws.

Let's be clear: Most of Texas' state prisoners deserve their
punishment or need to be put away to protect society. About half the
prison system's head count consists of violent offenders, and another
17 percent stole something or cheated somebody out of money.

Then there are the drug offenders, who constituted about 19 percent
of the population of more than 155,000 inmates last year. Those
convicted of possession alone made up about 11 percent.

A recent addition to that population is one Henry Walter Wooten, 54,
of Tyler, who had the poor judgment to stand around a park with a
joint in his mouth and baggies of weed in his pockets. Cops found
more in his car.

Bottom line: guilty as charged on possession charges and guilty for
sure of first-degree stupidity.

If Wooten's record had been clear, the amount of pot might have
gotten him no more than two years behind bars. But two convictions
from the 1980s - one for packing a gun, another for dealing drugs -
boosted the sentencing range. And the fact that he was within 1,000
feet of a day care center added more years, to a maximum of life.

The prosecutor asked for 99 years, to set a precedent for punishing
such crimes in Tyler. That kind of precedent would have been
grotesque. From our vantage point, 35 years still is too costly and
out of proportion to the crime, considering that it was a nonviolent
offense. Plus, Wooten will serve more - unserved time from his
previous drug conviction - since he was on parole at the time of his
marijuana bust.

What's the proper sentencing range? Something far less than the rest
of his life, which could be the case now and could stick the state
with the tab for health care in Wooten's last years.

In recent years, the state of Texas has been moving in the right
direction in expanding drug-treatment programs to break the costly
cycle of incarceration and avoid the need to build more prisons.

Testing the upper limits of sentencing laws for nonviolent drug
crimes may help rid streets of local riff-raff, but the cumulative
effect is a state prison system of unaffordable and unreasonable proportions.