MANDATORY READING ON MANDATORY MINIMUM SENTENCES

As Canada embraces mandatory minimum sentences for a multitude of
offences, including growing as few as six marijuana plants (six
months in prison), the United States Sentencing Commission has turned
against that country's obligatory penalties. "Excessively severe,"
the commission says. It prefers sentencing guidelines that would
allow judges some leeway.

It's a message Canada should take to heart. Partly because of the
frequent use of mandatory minimums, the size of the U.S. prison
population has exploded. A mind-boggling one in every four people
behind bars in the world is incarcerated in the United States. In
1985, there were 700,000 in jail; today, 2.3 million.

This is bad on many counts, but the one that has captured the
attention of leading U.S. conservatives is cost. In Canada, the
federal prison population rose by 1,000 to 14,500, in just 18 months,
partly as a result of new mandatory minimums, a federal report found
in August. At an average cost of $110,000 a year per inmate, the
benefits would be questionable at any time - all the more so when
economies nearly everywhere are at risk.

Judges, too, don't like them. In a survey done by the U.S. sentencing
commission last year, 62 per cent of federal trial-court judges said
the mandatory minimums were too high; just 38 per cent found them
appropriate (none found them too low). A federal judge in Utah, Paul
Cassell, explained in 2007 that he'd had to give a longer sentence to
a first offender who carried guns to several marijuana deals and
illegally possessed guns at home (55 years in total) than to a man
who beat a drinking buddy to death with a log - 21 years.

Mandatory minimum sentences have deep roots in U.S. history. As early
as 1790, in the first Congress, the mandatory minimum of the death
penalty applied to seven crimes, including forgery and rescuing a
person from execution. (The death penalty was not the maximum
penalty; dissection after death could be added to "intensify" the
punishment.) But now the commission, judges, some conservatives and
more than a few states are trying to reverse the trend to ever-more
and ever-longer minimums.

A key recommendation is that Congress, if it considers new minimum
penalties, should ask the sentencing commission what the impact will
be on the prisons. "Early analyses of prison impact may assist
Congress in focusing increasingly strained prison resources on
offenders who commit the most serious offences." That message, too,
should resonate for the Canadian government, which seems intent on
following the failed U.S. model, even as that country beats a retreat.