KLINE PUSHES FOR TOUGHER SENTENCING GUIDELINES FOR PROPERTY CRIME

Kansas' sentencing guidelines may be about to face the biggest
overhaul in their 10-year history.

Attorney General Phill Kline is pushing for a task force of law
enforcement officials to study and recommend possible changes.

His proposal has varying degrees of support from other top law
enforcement officials in the state.

Nola Foulston, district attorney in the 18th Judicial District, which
includes Wichita, agrees that now is a good time to revisit the
philosophy behind the guidelines.

"Even today, after 10 years, I think some have the feeling that they
stymie justice," she said.

Other district attorneys, such as Paul Morrison in Johnson County and
Nick Tomasic in Wyandotte County, generally favor the current
guidelines, although both say improvements can be made.

"They've done what they were supposed to do," Morrison said. "Never in
the history of Kansas have we had more sentencing horsepower for
violent offenders."

The guidelines were designed under the premise that the most violent,
repeat offenders should be held for the longest time in the state's
limited number of prison cells.

The trade-off was that nonviolent property criminals generally no
longer go to prison. Community-based programs are supposed to handle
those offenders.

Kline thinks the guidelines need to be toughened in areas such as
property crime, even if it means spending money to build more prisons.

"We have a serious problem," Kline said. "There are too many career
criminals on our streets."

Kline thinks public safety, not prison population management, should
be the primary focus of legislative sentencing policy.

Specific Sentences

The Kansas Legislature adopted the guidelines in 1993 to replace a
system of indeterminate sentencing that was widely criticized for
being inconsistently applied from judge to judge and region to region.

Lawmakers replaced the broad latitude afforded in the old system with
a more rigid set of sentencing options determined by the severity of
the crime and the criminal's record.

The guidelines take such factors as race and geographic location out
of the equation. They also give a specific sentence in months as
opposed to a range of years.

For instance, under the old system a man convicted of rape could
receive a minimum sentence of five to 20 years and a maximum sentence
of 15 years to life. Even with the maximum term, he would be eligible
for parole after serving 71/2 years.

Under the guidelines, a rapist with no criminal record would receive a
sentence of 155 months, just under 13 years. If the person had a
previous rape conviction, the sentence would be 253 months, about 21
years.

A career criminal convicted of rape would be looking at 54 years in
prison under the guidelines.

Maximum credit for good behavior is 15 percent under the guidelines,
as opposed to 50 percent under the old system.

The lack of judicial discretion is one thing that bothers
Foulston.

"Under the old system, judges had the ability to look at the
individual characteristics of each case," she said.

But to Tomasic, taking the individual prejudices and philosophy of a
particular judge out the equation is one of the guidelines' strengths.

"Now you have a good idea of what sentence you're facing, whether
you're in Wyandotte County, Johnson County or Dodge City," he said.

Missouri's sentencing system gives judges a wider range of options.
The state does not have a sentencing grid like the Kansas system.

Crowded Prisons

Prison numbers show how the Kansas guidelines have
succeeded.

The percentage of prison inmates serving sentences for property crimes
has dropped from about 21 percent in 1993 to just more than 6 percent
as of December 2002.

With that success comes the problem of prison crowding, because many
of the violent offenders are serving longer sentences.

The state's prison system is starting to see the effects of
"stacking," said Barbara Tombs, executive director of the Kansas
Sentencing Commission.

Criminals are coming into the system, but they are not leaving at the
same rate. The result is a prison population routinely near the
state's maximum capacity of 9,114.

"We've been operating at 98 to 99 percent of capacity," said
Corrections Secretary Roger Werholtz.

The population is projected to surpass capacity within a few years,
even without any changes to the guidelines.

The Legislature has modified the guidelines in recent years to
temporarily ease crowding. This year lawmakers approved a measure
requiring treatment outside prison for certain drug offenders.

Cost of Crime

Building -- and running -- a new prison is not cheap.

The construction cost of adding a 128-cell wing to the El Dorado
Correctional Facility is estimated at $7.1 million, according to the
Corrections Department.

And annual operating costs would be about $3 million to $4 million,
depending on whether the unit was used for medium-or maximum-security
prisoners.

Expensive, yes, but Kline said the human cost of additional crime
needed to be considered, too.

Foulston agreed that the need for people to feel safe from crime
should be a higher priority than how much it is going to cost to put
someone in prison.

"We're not advocates of building a big black hole out in western
Kansas to house all the prisoners," she said. "But we don't need
number crunchers telling us we need to put somebody in the
penitentiary."

Tomasic and Morrison agree that they would support changes that would
put more repeat property criminals in prison.

But Morrison said he is frustrated when he hears judges and
prosecutors complain they can't send an offender to prison because of
guidelines.

The guidelines have built-in provisions that judges and prosecutors
can use for either lighter or harsher sentences in appropriate cases,
he said.

"Many guidelines detractors are long on generalities but short on
specifics about how they can be improved," Morrison said.