Federal anti-crime programs are wasteful and "stupid," Julie Stewart, president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums writes in The Hill. While states are making money-saving changes in sentencing protocols, federal courts forge ahead with draconian sentences--for drug offenses, for example. Stewart writes, "This isn’t tough on crime -- it’s just stupid."
Stewart says she is encouraged that some elected officials, including U.S. Rep. Bobby Scott (D-VA) and U.S. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), are supporting reforms. Stewart concludes, "Most encouraging, the American public gets it. When asked by Pew if they agree with the statement, 'Some of the money that we are spending on locking up low-risk, nonviolent inmates should be shifted to strengthening community corrections programs like probation and parole,' a remarkable 85 percent of voters agreed. It’s time to stop wasting money on anti-crime programs and policies that don’t keep us safe, but make our tax bills higher."
By Ted Gest
An error in counting Georgia’s prison population means that the nationwide decline is not so large as reported by the Bureau of Justice Statistics in December.
Read full entry »Some federal mandatory minimum penalties "apply too broadly, are excessively severe, and are applied inconsistently across the country," the U.S. Sentencing Commission said in a report to Congress. The panel recommended that lawmakers "consider possible tailoring of the 'safety
valve' relief mechanism to other low-level, non-violent offenders convicted of other offenses carrying mandatory minimum penalties." It called on Congress to reevaluate the “stacking” of mandatory minimum penalties for certain federal firearms offenses because some of the resulting penalties "can be excessively severe and unjust, particularly in circumstances where there is no physical harm or threat of physical harm."
The commission said mandatory minimum penalties have contributed to a federal prison population that is 37 percent over capacity. As of September 30, 2010, about 39 percent of federal prisoners were subject to a mandatory minimum penalty at sentencing. Drug offenses accounted for 75 percent of mandatory minimum terms.
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By Bill Boyarsky
Are reporters missing the real story about our criminal justice system? A veteran California journalist says a recent conference on the state’s Three-Strikes law exposed the system’s endemic racism.
Read full entry »Missouri's Sentencing Advisory Commission has worked for years to devise a statistical model that helps judges decide which criminals to send to prison and which ones to place in community programs. The agency says its sentencing guidelines are a way to reserve prison space for the most violent offenders and to use community alternatives when they would best keep an offender from committing new crimes. Prosecutors have long criticized the guidelines as cookie-cutter justice, and they scored a victory yesterday when the Missouri House voted to abolish the commission, reports the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Rep. Stanley Cox said the agency's methodology was flawed and had the effect of promoting an agenda to reduce the prison population. "The end of this commission will, in fact, remove the inaccurate information that is communicated to our sentencing judges in the state of Missouri, whereby liberal judges are given cover to release from prison or reduce the sentence and give lighter sentences to the worst offenders, second offenders and violent offenders," Cox said. The House passed the bill, 100-57. It now moves to the Senate, which has until May 13, the Legislature's mandatory adjournment, to decide whether to pass it. Commission supporters said that its guidelines aren't perfect but that they should be fixed rather than scrapped. At issue is the state's development of "evidence-based" sentencing guidelines, which try to assess a criminal's risk of reoffending as an element in whether to send the person to prison.
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A special report prepared by Criminal Justice Journalists and the John Jay Center on Media, Crime and Justice.
Access Covering Criminal Justice (Sentencing, Corrections and Reentry) handbook here.
Read full entry »New federal sentencing guidelines go into effect today, raising or reducing the recommended time that drug offenders spend in prison depending on the quantity of drugs involved or the role the defendant played in the crime, the Denver Post reports. Last week, the U.S. Sentencing Commission voted to implement temporarily changes Congress made to the guidelines when the Fair Sentencing Act was passed into law over the summer. The advisory guidelines are used by federal judges to give a range of possible sentences in criminal cases.
The Fair Sentencing Act is intended to equalize sentencing in cases involving crack cocaine versus powder cocaine. Federal sentences have been much stiffer in crack-cocaine cases. Advocates argued that that punished African-American defendants, who often dealt in crack cocaine more than powder, more harshly than white suburban users of powder cocaine. In Colorado, U.S. Attorney John Walsh said, "The impact this will have on our cases as a group is less than it would be in those jurisdictions where they are bringing smaller crack cases," Walsh said. "Our focus has always been on major drug trafficking. While they have an impact, we don't think they are going to have a dramatic impact." While the mandatory-minimum changes may have a fairer result for some defendants, other changes to the drug sentencing guidelines could mean longer prison time for others. The new guidelines add several months of prison time for "aggravating factors" for leaders of drug rings who coerce or intimidate a girlfriend or elderly family member to deal drugs. Raymond Moore, Colorado's federal public defender, called the guideline changes a "political compromise" that doesn't go far enough to achieve fairness in sentencing.
On October 22, 2010, journalists from across Kentucky gathered at University of Kentucky School of Journalism and Telecommunications, for a reporting seminar co-sponsored by the Pew Center on the States and John Jay College of Justice’s Center on Media, Crime and Justice.
“The Future of Sentencing, Corrections and Crime Reduction in Kentucky: A Conversation between Journalists and Policymakers” featured panelists including Chief Justice John Minton, Supreme Court of Kentucky, Senate President David Williams (R), Kentucky Legislature, and Rhonda Henry, Executive Director, Bluegrass Rape Crisis Center.
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In a package of stories, The Economist magazine concludes that justice is harsher in America than in any other rich country. About 2.4 million Americans are behind bars, roughly one in every 100 adults. If those on parole or probation are included, one adult in 31 is under “correctional” supervision. As a proportion of its total population, America incarcerates five times more people than Britain, nine times more than Germany and 12 times more than Japan. Overcrowding is the norm. Federal prisons house 60% more inmates than they were designed for. State lock-ups are only slightly less stuffed.
The system has three big flaws, say criminologists. First, it puts too many people away for too long. Second, it criminalises acts that need not be criminalised. Third, it is unpredictable. Many laws, especially federal ones, are so vaguely written that people cannot easily tell whether they have broken them. In 1970 the proportion of Americans behind bars was below one in 400, compared with today’s one in 100. Since then, the voters, alarmed at a surge in violent crime, have demanded fiercer sentences. Politicians have obliged. New laws have removed from judges much of their discretion to set a sentence that takes full account of the circumstances of the offence. Since no politician wants to be tarred as soft on crime, such laws, mandating minimum sentences, are seldom softened. On the contrary, they tend to get harder.
Read full entry »A Missouri woman was convicted of videotaping the sexual abuse of her 16-year-old pregnant daughter. Advisory state guidelines recommended that she be put on probation. Instead, a judge sentenced her to 58 years in prison. "If 58 years is an appropriate sentence, which I think it is, then probation cannot be appropriate," said prosecutor Eric Zahnd, reflecting the frustrations of many that the advisory guidelines are too lenient. The disparity in that case is an extreme example of what critics say can be the irrelevance of guidelines used to try to bring consistency to punishment. Missouri officials are working on an overhaul to try to get the often-ignored guidelines more respect, reports the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
The National Center for State Courts says 20 states and the District of Columbia have guidelines, either mandatory or advisory. The center says they remain a hot topic among policymakers concerned with prison crowding and the disproportionate number of blacks incarcerated. (About 12 percent of Americans are black, but they are 44 percent of the prison population.) State Supreme Court Judge Michael Wolff, who heads the state sentencing commission, has appointed a subcommittee to review the process. It could result in anything from tweaks to the 175-page sentencing guide to a complete overhaul.
Read full entry »New rules will make it easier for federal judges to consider criminal defendants' military service, age, and mental and emotional conditions in determining more lenient prison sentences, rerepots the Wall Street Journal. The change were issued by the U.S. Sentencing Commission, which develops advisory guidelines that most federal judges use to calculate sentences.
As a result of the changes, effective Nov. 1, some defendants could receive a get of several months or several years, said Mauro Wolfe, a former federal prosecutor now a defense attorney in New York. Previously the sentencing commission said factors such as age and military service "are not ordinarily relevant in determining" whether a lower sentence is warranted. Congress is unlikely to block the changes, said Doug Berman, a law professor at Ohio State University. Berman said the changes were significant because historically most guidelines amendments by the commission have called for increases, not decreases, in sentence length.
Read full entry »Five years after the Supreme Court held that the federal sentencing guidelines are no longer binding, judges for the most part continue to follow them, though there is an ever-growing divergence, say recent federal sentencing statistics reported by the New Jersey Law Journal. Judges still are struggling to grasp the degree of discretion the high court handed back to them when it held that the guidelines violate the Sixth Amendment right to a jury because they required harsher sentences based on facts found by judges rather than jurors.
Statistics released April 9, show that for the year ending Sept. 30, 2009, 56.8 percent of sentences were inside the guidelines, down from 61.7 for 2006, the first year after the Supreme Court ruling. Though nationally more than half of sentences are within the guidelines, the rate varies widely from district to district -- from a low of 27.8 percent in the District of Arizona to a high of 92.3 percent in the District for the Northern Mariana Islands, both part of the 9th Circuit. The second lowest and highest rates of fealty to the guidelines were Vermont's 30.8 percent and the Southern District of Mississippi's 80.7 percent.
Read full entry »Black and Hispanic men are more likely to receive longer prison sentences than their white counterparts since the Supreme Court loosened federal sentencing rules, says a U.S. Sentencing Commission study reported by McClatchy Newspapers. The study reignited a long-running debate about whether federal judges need to be held to mandatory guidelines in order to stamp out inherent biases and dramatically disparate sentences.
The report analyzed sentences since the 2005 U.S. v. Booker decision gave federal judges much more sentencing discretion. The commission found that the racial difference in sentences peaked in 1999 with blacks receiving 14 percent longer sentences. By 2002, the commission found no statistical difference. After the Booker decision, "those differences appear to have been increasing steadily," with black men receiving sentences that were up to 10 percent longer than those imposed on whites, the commission said. Using another method of analyzing the data, the study found black men received sentences 23 percent longer than white men's.
Senior Associate
Public Safety Performance Project
Pew Center on the States
Nevada
Read full entry »The results of a long-term study into alternative sentencing due out today is expected to help South Carolina legislators grappling with violence in the community and a major budget crunch, reports the Charleston Post and Courier. The paper first revealed the difficulties at the state Department of Probation, Parole and Pardon Services in the five-part series published in August 2008. The series found that criminals out on probation or parole terrorize the community as the system intended to watch over them continues to be overwhelmed.
The agency's troubles continue. It lost 101 agents in the past two years due to dramatically falling state tax collections. More cuts could be on the way. The Sentencing Reform Commission was created by the Legislature in 2008 to study alternative sentencing for nonviolent offenders as a way to free up space within the prisons and review the parole system for improvements. Putting more money in the criminal justice system isn't a possibility right now, nor is raising taxes to come up with new revenue, officials said.
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