STATE NEEDS SENTENCING GUIDELINES FOR FAIRNESS

If legislators had used the same logic about the General Fund budget
that Sen. Rodger Smitherman, D-Birmingham, applied to volunteer
sentencing guidelines, they would not have passed the spending bill.

The senator explained that legislators didn't pass the Alabama
Sentencing Commission's bills because members didn't approve the
guidelines until about a month before the session ended. That, he
said, didn't give legislators enough time to study the changes.

Legislators, however, passed a $1.4 billion budget on the last night
of the session last week, only hours after a conference committee
reached a compromise.

Basically, the sentencing guidelines called for a person convicted of
a crime in one county to get about the same sentence handed out for a
similar crime in another county.

Some in the judiciary don't like the guidelines because they pride
themselves on being hanging judges. That's good politics in some
places. In addition, the guidelines would have eased the overcrowded
prison problem through lighter minimum sentences for certain
non-violent drug and property crimes.

The Sentencing Commission has been at work for four years studying
cases and sentences, so most of its findings are hardly new.

The Legislature got the state into its current prison mess by hiking
sentences, while not providing money to house and maintain inmates.
The result is that not courts, but parole boards are emptying prisons
of nonviolent offenders.

Many judges would like the political cover that sentencing guidelines
give, but legislators fear being labeled as retreating from their
get-tough, stay-tough policy.

The commission members did good work and its recommendations deserve
more than the usual politics for which the Legislature is noted.