ATLANTA — With hearings in Chicago recently, the U.S. Sentencing Commission reached the halfway post, give or take, in its cross-country review of the federal sentencing recommendations that are its charge, guidelines the states typically follow, too.
The commission was created 22 years ago as a fix for the wide disparity in sentences for the same crimes in various jurisdictions. A five-year sentence in one place could be 10 to 20 in another, or maybe probation in still a third.
The fix has become part of another problem. By snatching away sizeable chunks of judicial discretion, the commission, as it realizes itself, has contributed to the creation over the last two decades of a prison population so large it defies economic, social and even correctional good sense.
We have more people, and a greater percentage of our people, in jails and prisons than any other country. To believe that this is necessary, you have to believe that Americans are just, hands down, the worst people on Earth.
We have a record 7.3 million people in corrections programs, one in every 31 of us, and one in every 100 behind bars. The United States has 5 percent of the world's population and an astounding one-quarter of its prison population.
Prison populations have continued to climb even as crime has been going down. One big factor has been the increased legislative resort to longer sentences for fad crimes, especially nonviolent ones like drug use or minor dealing. No legislator ever lost re-election for sending more people to prison for longer periods.
Times served in prison grew 44 percent between 1995 and 2006. Especially notorious have been the absurdly long sentences for crack cocaine as compared to power cocaine although they are the same drug, just in different form.
The consequences have been disproportionately devastating in the black community, where the cheaper crack has outpaced powder. African-Americans are four times more likely than whites to be in some form of correctional control, largely because of drug sentences, even though white and black drug use are roughly equal.
That disparity has burdened black America with a large population of men whose best prospects for employment are underemployment and who can offer scant promise as husbands and fathers.
The United States is now spending about $60 billion a year to build new prisons and maintain the populations of the prisons we already have. The larger part of the tab falls to the states, a bill they can do little to reduce in the short run even as, counterproductively, they cut education budgets to make ends meet.
The sentencing commission has shown a new readiness for flexibility in the last couple of years.
If that is reflected strongly in its eventual report perhaps the commission can lead the federal and state systems alike to replace political pathology with sensible policy that eschews show-off sentences and needless ones. Alternatives such as drug treatment and counseling have proven in pilot projects to be more effective than prison at keeping nonviolent offenders out of the criminal justice system's revolving doors.
Tom Teepen is a columnist for Cox Newspapers. He is based in Atlanta. E-mail: teepencolumn(at)earthlink.net.
