CRIME AND CONSEQUENCES

Robert Lawson was the chief architect of the 1975 overhaul of
Kentucky's criminal code. He's an authority on the rules that govern
criminal proceedings in the commonwealth. As a University of Kentucky
law school professor, he trained many of the attorneys who now serve
as members of the Kentucky General Assembly. And he is not known as a
bleeding heart liberal. So when Lawson began circulating private
copies of a 72-page report which argues that Kentucky is incarcerating
too many inmates for too long, policy-makers in the state began to sit
up and take notice. "If they don't listen to him, they are not going
to listen to anybody,'' Kentucky Parole Board Chairman John Coy told
the Louisville Courier-Journal, in a story picked up by the Associated
Press.

Lawson's argument -- scheduled to be published as a law review article
next year -- has been heard before in other contexts and from other
experts, but it has merit: Kentucky, along with Ohio and a host of
other states, has gone too far with its "three strikes'' sentencing
guidelines for repeat offenders.

Lawson says changes made to Kentucky's criminal code over the past 30
years have left it with a "brutally harsh'' policy toward repeat
offenders, particularly those who do not commit violent crimes. And,
his report says, it locks up too many drug offenders and doesn't grant
parole often enough. That's largely why Kentucky's prison population
rose from about 2,800 in 1970 to more than 17,300 last year, and why
its prison budget jumped from $7 million to more than $300 million
during the same period.

Ohio did the same thing, but on a larger scale. Get-tough sentencing
laws helped drive a five-fold increase in its prison population since
the early 1970s, to a peak of about 48,000 inmates in 1999. Since
then, the state has been trying to drive down its prison population
(it's about 44,200 now), mainly by devoting more resources to
community-based alternatives that range from home incarceration to
halfway houses to minimum-security detention centers.

The fact is, there aren't any easy fixes -- and certainly none that
can be justified on the basis of saving money. Among the points that
policymakers should keep in mind, we believe, are these:

. Keeping violent criminals off the streets does, in fact, reduce
crime.

. Most felony sentences for drug abuse and some for non-violent
crimes probably don't require incarceration in a state prison.

. Most options for reducing the statewide prison population will tend
to shift costs, responsibilities and risk to local units of
government. Kentucky's jails already hold about one-fourth of the
state's prison population (it's cheaper for the state to pay counties
to house its prisoners than to build and staff state penal
institutions.)

. Even with the current sentencing code, nearly 10,000 men and women
will enter or leave Kentucky's penal system each year. The state is
obligated to help integrate people back into society once they've
served their terms.

What it adds up to is this: Kentucky probably needs more flexibility
in its criminal sentencing laws and a greater array of community-based
alternatives for dealing with those who commit serious crimes.

In any event, Lawson has performed another valuable public service.
Here's hoping his report helps provoke a fresh look at Kentucky's
criminal code and the penal system that it feeds.