THE PLANK OCTOBER 31, 2007
-
Read Later
READ LATERAvailable only to subscribers. SUBSCRIBE TODAY
-
Listen
ARTICLE AUDIO
- Font Size
You've probably seen this: The Supreme Court just put a de facto moratorium on all executions until Baze v. Rees, a lethal injection case from Kentucky, gets decided next spring. (Here's one prediction on how that will turn out.)
For my money, though, the bigger criminal-justice news is that, tomorrow, the U.S. Sentencing Commission's new guidelines come into effect, reducing the disparity in penalties for crack and powder cocaine. It's not a huge change (see here), but it's something. According to the Legal Times, if those guidelines are made retroactive—that's still undecided—then some 19,500 federal prisoners would be released early.
So there's that; there's the fact that the Supreme Court looks set to give judges some leeway to deviate from the 100-to-1 disparity; and now conservatives like J.C. Watts and Pat Nolan are writing op-eds in places like The Washington Times arguing that the crack gap is unjust and counterproductive and needs to be fixed. I don't know if Congress is any closer to finally making its own reforms (like, say, Biden's bill to eliminate the disparity entirely), but the momentum's nudging in that direction.
--Bradford Plumer
6 comments
alright, gotta get me some crack.
- blackton
October 31, 2007 at 3:17pm
We shouldn't rest until the crack gap is closed! Our national security is at stake!
BSD
- bsdespain
October 31, 2007 at 3:35pm
BSD- nice.
Once again, Biden ahead of the curve and doing the right thing.
- boneill
October 31, 2007 at 4:07pm
It's progress, but still amounts to fiddling around on the edges of a huge problem.
In my view, the fundamental issue is our tendency to shift the emphasis away from the actual social and medical issue of drug dependency, to political grandstanding by means of scapegoats.
Particular drugs (crack vs powder, smack vs alcohol, LSD vs marijuana, etc.), and particular characters ("drug kingpins" vs poor street dealers, addicts vs Third World subsistence farmers, etc) are cartoons. Anyone with any experience in effective treatment programs will tell you that focusing on personal responsibility is the one and only effective way to address the problem. Users recover when they decide taking drugs is bad for them. Until they do nothing helps, and prohibition makes matters worse in many objectively verifiable ways.
This is a critical issue not only in terms of our legal justice/corrections system and domestic harmony, but foreign policy as well. There would be no more effective way to support critical allies like Hamid Karzai than by de-criminalization of drugs. Does anyone really believe that we need a vast, multi-billion dollar, militarized foreign and domestic bureaucracy to protect us from ourselves?
- Robert Powell
November 1, 2007 at 4:24am
Can someone tell me - this is not rhetorical, I'm genuinely stumped - why all this stuff isn't made retroactive automatically? I'm thinking of the Genarlow Wison case, of course, and the big stink about the "legistature's intent" to keep it from being retroactive. Why would you want to change an unfair sentencing law - your motivations being fairness, and also possibly prison overcrowding - and not make it retroactive? Is there a possibility that it was fair then, but unfair now? Is it administratively burdensome to figure out who is in prison right now, who shouldn't be, because he was sentenced by the old, unfair rules?
The only thing I can think of is that retroactivity is a bargaining chip in the legislature. But I can't even picture that - if a legislator wants to look tough on crime he'll vote against it, not come back to his constituents and say "I voted for it, but only on the condition that it not be retroactive!" - what gives? Someone tell me, please.
Thank you,
Phoebe
- psantillana
November 1, 2007 at 4:16pm
Apparently, Phoebe, no one else has any more idea as to the "why" of this than we do....
- Robert Powell
November 3, 2007 at 5:37am