RETHINKING LONG SENTENCES

You can tell that a backlash against the nation's tough-on-crime
legislative binge of the last two decades is for real by the
conservatives helping to lead the charge.

Take U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, a Reagan nominee, who spoke
out the other day against mandatory minimum sentences for federal crimes.
"Our resources are misspent, our punishments too severe, our sentences too
long," Kennedy told the annual meeting of the American Bar Association.

What's more, as USA Today reported recently, fiscal conservatives are
spearheading the drive in many hard-pressed states to release
non-violent offenders early, to send drug users to treatment centers
in lieu of prison and to otherwise reduce sentences. Congress and
state legislatures spent the 1980s and '90s toughening laws and
lengthening sentences -- one reason the land of the free now leads the
world in putting its citizens under lock and key. Some 2.1 million
Americans are now behind bars.

Worse, incarceration and crime reduction haven't correlated, except perhaps
inversely. As a rough rule in the 1990s, states that led in prison expansion
lagged in crime reduction.

Wisconsin is a case in point. Sentencing guidelines, a
federal practice, make sense, as Kennedy noted. They lead to
consistency in treatment. But he argued correctly that the guidelines
should be ratcheted downward. What's more, the minimum sentences
should be advisory, not mandatory, as they are for some federal
crimes. To avoid the miscarriage of justice that is too commonplace in
the federal system, a judge deserves more discretion to tailor a
sentence to the defendant's degree of culpability and other factors.

One consequence of the tough-on-crime spree is that the ranks of
elderly prisoners are swelling, as another USA Today article noted. A
California study puts the cost of their confinement at two to three
times that of average inmates. Of course, no one advocates the
premature release of violent criminals, especially repeat offenders,
and some inmates guilty of especially heinous crimes deserve to grow
old and die in prison. But as a rule, the federal government and state
legislatures stiffened laws recklessly. Now, the morning after, sober
voices -- including conservative ones -- are calling for a rollback of
these legislative excesses. For the sake of justice and fiscal sense,
lawmakers should heed the sage advice.