This is an extension of my last post, which dealt with zero-tolerance policies. I want to look at other mandates that strip decision making powers from designated decision makers. I'm most concerned about mandatory minimum sentences, particularly with respect to drug offenders. We should have stood up and taken notice when Gen. Barry McCaffrey, the country's drug czar at the time, called our ever increasing prison population, "America's internal gulag." The United States has roughly 2.4 million people in prison or jail. China is next with about 1.5 million people incarcerated, but they have more than four times our population. We are by far the most imprisoned society on the face of the earth both in terms of raw numbers and percentage of citizens locked up. When you consider this, along with the fact that our prison population explosion, which began with the Nixon era crackdown on drugs but really took off with the Reagan era hysteria over drugs, which resembled a small child's fear of the bogeyman, we should all feel uneasy when we call ourselves the land of the free and the home of the brave.
Why would we mandate what judges must do, before all the facts are revealed and circumstances considered? We're not removing these jurists for acting improperly, but we're saying that they can't be trusted to do a proper job. That sounds like giving an electrician a contract to rewire a building while declaring that he or she can't be trusted to work on electrical systems. Are empathy and compassion really such pernicious demons that they must be exorcised by preemptive strike, and a judge cannot be allowed to use judgment? This is what happens when a society takes its orders from reactionaries who dismissively say, "Off with their heads!" as long they don't have to actually see, let alone be, the one who swings the axe, not to mention those being so harshly punished or their devastated loved ones. We're tough as nails as long everything is sanitized and we can easily ignore the impact of what we've wrought.
Harsh mandatory sentencing is fraught with problems and unintended consequences. Due to sharply increased prison expenditures, many cash strapped states have been forced to make offsetting reductions to education spending. We can also safely say that the massive cost of warehousing non-violent drug offenders has not yielded a satisfactory return. We have not seen the reduction in crime we expected from imprisoning so many for so long. One perverse unintended consequence is that low-level drug offenders are now often sentenced far more harshly than those who truly plague our society because, unlike more dangerous criminals, they typically have nothing to offer prosecutors who now have the discretion instead of judges. Also, since flooding our prisons is a relatively new phenomenon, we don't yet know the impact of eventually releasing such a multitude of people hardened by prison and forever stigmatized as criminals.
I'm sympathetic to those who have the extremely difficult and thankless job of constructing and implementing our system of justice, but we should have seen this coming. Since budget crises across the country are causing states to release prisoners earlier than they had planned, the time to correct the injustice may be here. While the issue of prison expense is center stage, we are presented with a golden opportunity to revisit some wrongheaded policies. Reform proposals will be met with reflexive cries of "soft on crime", but they can be neutralized with fiscal reality. Would-be reformers can explain to people who are terrified that someone might smoke a joint instead of drinking a beer that we'll be happy to lock that person up, but we'll need you to pony up more taxes to do so.
