TOUGH SENTENCES DO LITTLE TO CUT CRIME

At a recent televised news conference, Gov. Bush touted the latest crime
figures in Florida, which showed a decline for the 12th year in a row.
Eager to gain political advantage from this happy news, the governor said
the drop was because of tougher sentencing laws adopted during his
administration. Not surprisingly, Bush's statement tells only part of the
story.

Crime rates are down all over the country and have been going down for
several years. In Florida, the decline in the crime rate began seven years
before Gov. Bush took office and well before there was any serious
toughening of Florida's sentencing laws. This strongly suggests that there
were other reasons for the decline.

The most widely accepted explanation for the decline in crime rates has to
do with demographics. Over the past 20 or more years, the median age of the
American population has pushed steadily upward. It's not just that we're
all getting older, but the country as a whole is getting older too. That
means that young males are a smaller proportion of the society than they
used to be. This affects the crime rate because young males commit the
greatest number of crimes. So as the percentage of young males in the
society has gone down, the crime rate has gone down.

For politicians, the trouble with this explanation is that there is no way
to take credit for demographic changes -- they happen without our elected
officials doing anything. So politicians like the governor try to give all
the credit to something they can claim, like tougher sentencing laws. The
truth, however, is that crime would have declined in Florida and throughout
the nation without them.

Of course, tougher sentencing laws have made some slight contribution to
the decline in crime. But consider their cost: Nationally we imprison more
than 2 million people, almost five times the number we incarcerated just 25
years ago. Prison budgets have ballooned everywhere, as expenditures for
services such as schools and health care have dwindled. Think of the unmet
needs the Florida Legislature could address with the money saved by cutting
our prison population by 20 percent. And if properly administered, even
this substantial reduction would have little or no effect on Florida's
crime rate.

Besides the economic cost, there is the human cost of draconian sentencing
laws. Every day, we read newspaper stories about people given excessive
sentences. Among the most recent was the man in chronic pain who got a
25-year mandatory minimum sentence for copying a prescription. There was
also the boy who burglarized a home and got a mandatory 10 years because he
happened to steal a gun. And soon we will read about the parent who
tragically left a gun where a child found it; under Florida's sentencing
guidelines his sentence will be 61/2 to 81/2 years.

These people deserve punishment -- but not outlandish sentences such as
these. And such sentences do not affect just the criminals. For every
person given an excessive sentence, there is at least one innocent spouse,
child, parent or loved one whose world is turned upside down. These
innocent victims also suffer from excessive sentencing.

We can all be happy that the nation's demographics have driven down the
crime rate. But we should not allow politicians to take credit for this
development. The tougher sentencing laws they have championed have done
little to lower crime, and they have cost us dearly both in economic and
human terms. We need sensible sentencing laws, not politicians' sound bites.

Robert Batey is a professor of criminal law at Stetson University College
of Law in Gulfport and a local coordinator in St. Petersburg for the
national organization Families Against Mandatory Minimums.