Toward Saner, More Effective Prison Sentences - NYTimes.com

The sentencing reform bill introduced in the Senate on Thursday falls far short of what is needed, but it is a crucial first step on the long path toward unwinding the federal government’s decades-long reliance on prisons as the answer to every ill.

For starters, it is worth noting the bipartisan nature of this legislation. In a Senate that can’t agree on the time of day, top Republican and Democratic senators — most notably Senator Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, as well as a longtime supporter of harsh sentencing laws — negotiated for months to produce a concrete set of fixes.

Among the most significant are those that would reduce mandatory-minimum sentences for many drug crimes. These sentences are jaw-droppingly long — from five years for a first offense up to life without parole for a third. The new bill would cut the life sentence to a 25-year minimum, and would cut the 20-year sentence for a second offense to 15 years.

These may seem like minor tweaks to pointlessly long sentences, and for the most part they are. But when half of all federal inmates are in for drug crimes, even small changes can make a real difference.

Senator Tim Scott, a Republican from South Carolina, with Democratic senators including Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, second from right, during a press conference about sentencing reform on Thursday.

Win Mcnamee / Getty Images

In addition, the bill would give federal judges more power to impose sentences below the mandatory minimum in certain cases, rather than being forced to apply a strict formula. This would shift some power away from prosecutors, who coax plea deals in more than 97 percent of cases, often by threatening defendants with outrageously long punishments.

Other provisions would give more inmates the chance to earn early release by participating in educational and other rehabilitative programming; seal or expunge juvenile records, so people are not burdened for life because of crimes they committed when they were young; and make it easier for older inmates to seek early release — a smart idea because they are by far the costliest to keep imprisoned and the least likely to commit new crimes.

Finally, and critically, many parts of the bill are retroactive, which means thousands of current federal inmates could benefit immediately. In particular, 6,500 prisoners are still serving time under an old law that punished crack-cocaine offenses far more severely than powder-cocaine offenses. When the law was altered to reduce the disparity in 2010, the change applied only to new cases, leaving thousands of inmates serving unjustly long sentences for no good reason.

There is still a long way to go. Four decades of extreme sentencing policies have deadened the public’s sensitivity to what five years behind bars means, let alone 25 or more. Many people assumed that those serving long sentences must, by definition, be the worst offenders. But that has not been true; moreover, excessive sentences do little to deter crime. Studiessuggest that certainty in punishment is more important to effective deterrence than the punishment’s severity.

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So much of American sentencing policy has been driven by irrational, fact-free scare-mongering. This new bill would, at the very least, provide volumes of data that could show — as otherlegislative efforts have already shown — that it’s possible to reduce both prison populations and crime at the same time.

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