TOUGH SENTENCING LAWS ARE OUT OF STEP WITH DECLINING STATE, U.S. CRIME RATES

At a televised news conference, Gov. Jeb 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 due to 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 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 last 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 over 2 million people, almost five times the number we
incarcerated just 25 years ago.

Prison budgets have ballooned everywhere, as expenditures for services
like 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, say, 20 percent. And
if properly administered, even this substantial reduction in the ranks
of the incarcerated 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 like
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.