AN IDEA WHOSE TIME SHOULD BE PAST

The mandatory sentencing craze that began in the 1970s was a
public-policy disaster. It drove up inmate populations and
corrections costs and forced the states to choose between building
prisons and building schools or funding medical care for the
indigent. It filled the prisons to bursting with nonviolent drug
offenders who would have been more cheaply and more appropriately
dealt with through treatment. It tied the hands of judges and ruined
countless young lives by mandating lengthy prison terms in cases
where leniency was warranted. It undermined confidence in the
fairness of the justice system by singling out poor and minority
offenders while largely exempting the white and wealthy.

The Supreme Court recognized the flaws in this system last week when
it ruled that federal judges were justified in handing out lower
sentences for drug offenders than were laid out in federal sentencing
guidelines. The United States Sentencing Commission, the independent
body that sets those guidelines, has called for easing drug-crime
sentences for some categories of offenders and for doing so
retroactively. In addition, bills pending in Congress would rewrite
federal drug statutes, making treatment more readily available and
sentences fairer and more sensible.

Nowhere is repeal of mandatory-sentencing policies more urgently
needed than in New York, which sparked an unfortunate national trend
when it passed its draconian Rockefeller drug laws in the 1970s.
Local prosecutors tend to love this law because it allows them to
bypass judges and decide unilaterally who goes to jail and for how long.

But the general public is increasingly skeptical of a system that
railroads young, first-time offenders straight to prison with no hope
of treatment or reprieve. In an often-cited 2002 poll by The New York
Times, for example, 79 percent of respondents favored changing the
law to give judges control over sentencing. And 83 percent said that
judges should be allowed to send low-level drug offenders to
treatment instead of prison.

The State Legislature has tinkered at the margins of these horrific
laws, but stopped short of restoring judicial discretions. The time
is clearly right for that crucial next step. The Legislature needs to
gear up for the change, and Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who has thus far
tiptoed around the subject, needs to set the stage when he delivers
his State of the State message early next month.