THE MANDATORY MINIMUM CRISIS

While most of state government is shrinking, or at least not growing,
Florida's prison system continues to grow by leaps and bounds. The
tell-tale numbers are eye-catching.

In 1995, the entire state prison budget was $1.6 billion. This year,
it is $2.4 billion.

In 1987, for every dollar spent on higher education in our state, 34
cents was spent on corrections. Today, that number is 66 cents.

There are more than 101,000 inmates locked up in Florida prisons "" a
20 percent increase from just five years ago. And if the current rate
of growth continues, state analysts predict the population will hit
115,000 within five years, requiring nine new prisons at a cost of
$862 million.

It is against this fiscal background "" and forecasts of a potential
$5 billion state budget deficit next year "" that has a growing
number of policy and fiscal watchdogs urging Florida lawmakers to
rethink and rescind many of the state's mandatory minimum sentence
laws, which are among the harshest in the nation.

"oeIt is time for us to rethink 30-year-old policies that may have
served the state well in their time," states a new report from the
respected Collins Center for Public Policy, a Miami-based think tank
established by the Legislature to advise it on public policy issues.

"oeBut their time has passed. We know more now. Continuing to pour
money into a bloated prison system in a time of fiscal austerity is
not only unsustainable, it confounds common sense."

Like the Collins Center, the conservative, business-backed Florida
TaxWatch and the respected Pew Center on the States also have homed in
on Florida's burgeoning prison population and budget, calling for
reducing or eliminating mandatory minimum sentences for non-violent
offenders and creating more sentencing alternatives like drug courts,
among other reforms.

The groups recognize more people are serving longer sentences than
anytime in history. More than 41,000 of Florida's inmates have no
chance of parole in large part because of these laws, and one in 10 is
serving a life sentence.

When the first mandatory minimum laws were passed in Florida in 1979,
it was the height of Miami's cocaine wars.

The intent was to make an unmistakable statement to hard-core
criminals. But over the years, too many nonviolent offenders have
gotten snared by the inflexibility of mandatory sentencing laws,
straining not only the public treasury, but the bounds of humanitarian
justice.

The laws are so hard and fast that they have weakened the authority
and discretion of judges, supplanting it to prosecutors, who decide
whether an accused criminal will be charged with a mandatory minimum
offense or not.

Study after study in state after state, meanwhile, has shown mandatory
minimum sentences do not deter crime. Nor do parole and alternative
sentencing programs lead to increases in crime.

It is time to rethink these archaic laws, and with the fiscal forecast
Florida faces, no time is better than now.