Sentencing changes for crack cocaine

U.S. Sentencing Commission votes for changes to crack cocaine
sentencing guidelines!


WASHINGTON, D.C.: For the first time in 12 years, the U.S. Sentencing
Commission has approved guideline changes to federal crack cocaine
penalties tonight, by a 6-1 vote. The amendment affects approximately
78 percent of defendants convicted of crack cocaine offenses, reducing
their sentences by an average of 16 months. It will now be sent to
Congress on May 1, 2007, along with other proposed sentencing
amendments.


"While this incremental change is a far cry from the
'equalization' of crack and powder cocaine the Commission recommended
in 1995, it is a long overdue first step to improving crack
sentences," said Julie Stewart, president of Families Against
Mandatory Minimums (FAMM), a national, nonpartisan sentencing reform
organization.


For 15 years the Commission has researched crack cocaine and its
penalties and concluded current federal crack sentences are
unjustifiable. Among the findings from its 2002 report are that crack
penalties


1. exaggerate the relative harmfulness of crack cocaine
2. sweep too broadly and apply most often to lower level offenders
3. overstate the seriousness of most crack cocaine offenses and fail
to provide adequate proportionality
4. and mostly impact minorities


Despite this evidence, Congress and the U.S. Sentencing Commission have
been in a stalemate for a dozen years over how to improve crack
sentences. During that time, nearly 56,000 people were sentenced under
the harsh federal crack cocaine statutes and guidelines. Now, the
U.S. Sentencing Commission has taken the bold step of saying enough is
enough.


"While the Commission's amendment does not solve the problem of
excessive crack cocaine penalties it moves us closer to that goal,
which is why FAMM supports the Commission's crack amendment," says
Stewart.


Congress has six months to consider the amendments before they
automatically take effect on November 1, 2007. Congress would have to
pass bills in both the House and Senate to stop the amendment. It is
highly unlikely such an action will happen this year. If passed, the
amendment will not affect people sentenced before November 1, 2007.


The U.S. Sentencing Commission's crack guideline amendment will
be accompanied by language to Congress that urges them to address the
crack cocaine mandatory minimum. Combined changes to the sentencing
guidelines and mandatory minimum statutes for crack cocaine would
result in more appropriate penalties for roughly 5,000 defendants who
face crack sentences each year. With their faces in mind, FAMM
applauds the Commission for acting on an injustice that can no longer
be tolerated.


Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM) is a national, nonpartisan,
nonprofit organization that promotes just sentencing policies. For more
information, visit: www.famm.org.

What's wrong with the drug war?

What's Wrong With the Drug War?

taken from web site
www.drugpolicy.org

Everyone has a stake in ending the war on drugs. Whether you’re a parent concerned about protecting children from drug-related harm, a social justice advocate worried about racially disproportionate incarceration rates, an environmentalist seeking to protect the Amazon rainforest or a fiscally conservative taxpayer you have a stake in ending the drug war. U.S. federal, state and local governments have spent hundreds of billions of dollars trying to make America “drug-free.” Yet heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine and other illicit drugs are cheaper, purer and easier to get than ever before. Nearly half a million people are behind bars on drug charges - more than all of western Europe (with a bigger population) incarcerates for all offenses. The war on drugs has become a war on families, a war on public health and a war on our constitutional rights.

Many of the problems the drug war purports to resolve are in fact caused by the drug war itself. So-called “drug-related” crime is a direct result of drug prohibition's distortion of immutable laws of supply and demand. Public health problems like HIV and Hepatitis C are all exacerbated by zero tolerance laws that restrict access to clean needles. The drug war is not the promoter of family values that some would have us believe. Children of inmates are at risk of educational failure, joblessness, addiction and delinquency. Drug abuse is bad, but the drug war is worse.

Visit these pages to see how the drug war affects all aspects of our lives:

Drug War Funding
Pain Underprescribing
Terrorism
Informants
Environmental Consequences
Economics
Mandatory Minimum Sentences
Voter Disenfranchisement
Public Health Crisis
Access to Treatment
Higher Education Act
Public Benefits
Forced Evictions

Louisvillle Church group CLOUT says Stop the Revolving Door.

Group wants to rehabilitate criminals, stop 'revolving door'

March 20, 2007 01:51 PM

By Mark Schnyder

Courier Journal

(LOUISVILLE) -- A lot of criminals end up breaking the law repeatedly, going in and out of jail their entire lives. Now an organization made up of area church congregations is calling on Kentucky to stop the revolving door at state prisons. WAVE 3 Investigator Mark Schnyder has more.

It was a Monday night sermon where the participants hope passion can solve a problem.

"Me and my colleagues in the ministry are tired of burying young people, victims of drug murders -- we're going to do something about it," said the Rev. Elvyn Hamilton to a crowd of about 700 CLOUT (Citizens of Louisville Organized and United Together) members at the 4th Avenue United Methodist Church Monday night.

In response, the crowd chanted: "Stop the revolving door! Stop the revolving door!"

Hundreds of people from more than a dozen metro area churches chanted CLOUT's mantra. Meanwhile, Louisville residents, organized and united together, put some of the state justice system's heaviest hitters on the spot.

"Do you agree we have a problem with the revolving door?" Bishop Walter Jones asked Kentucky Department of Corrections Commissioner John Rees.

His response: "yes."

Bishop Walter Jones called on Rees and State Supreme Court Chief Justice Joseph Lambert to commit to doing more to treat people going through the system with drug problems so they don't keep coming back. But amid the calls for more programs, treatment centers and drug courts, a revelation: it's already happening.

In the last nine years in Kentucky the number of drug courts -- which put offenders on a road to recovery -- have grown from 12 to 60.

"Drug courts have grown dramatically," Justice Lambert said. "Now every person who enters drug court does not leave successfully, there are failures. But the failures are vastly outweighed by the successes."

Justice Lambert and Commissioner Rees did not agree to every request CLOUT called for. Rees would not commit to creating a new training program for drug and alcohol addiction for the probation and paroles office, and Justice Lambert couldn't promise a licensed treatment component in Jefferson County's drug court program.

But CLOUT leaders say they got some things done.

The director of Metro Corrections was also invited to take the heat, but he did not attend. CLOUT wants him to develop a new drug treatment program for jail inmates.

Online Reporter: Mark Schnyder

Online Producer:

Stop the prison revolving door. . .

Stop the Revolving Door By Mark A.R. Kleiman DLC | Blueprint Magazine | September 25, 2002 Paschal: Our first organizing meeting of a coalition of persons and organizations called Kentuckians Expective Effective Criminal Justice, held this morning, April 18, with 20 persons present, concluded that the focus should be Stopping the Relvoving Door. I will be posting articles and discussions under this focus for our work so that we all might be better informed and aware. Notice some of the facts offered in the first paragraph below. No matter how much we pat ourselves on the back about the recent declines in U.S. crime rates, the fact remains that crime is about three times as prevalent in America today as it was as recently as 1960. Even now, our homicide rate remains at about five times the level of that in the rest of the developed world. The consequences of high crime rates go far beyond the numbers. Much of America's social geography is dictated by the desire to avoid victimization. What else could explain the coexistence of high housing prices and residential abandonment in the same metropolitan areas? Everyone knows that poverty leads to crime; less attention is paid to the ways that crime leads to poverty by driving jobs and services away from the places poor people live. Given how much nonsense office-seekers are forced to talk when they discuss crime, its declining salience as a political issue is a welcome development. But controlling crime remains a central challenge for American society; we continue to face the threat that an upsurge in crime (such as the one the United States suffered in the 1960s or the one Western Europe has been suffering recently) will give anti-progressive political forces another great political opportunity. So what is to be done? Arguments about crime control tend to focus on how to change the behavior of criminals. In some ways, that's the easy part; criminals respond when their behavior has immediate and predictable consequences. The hard part is changing the behavior of officials to make those things happen. Reducing the crime rate is more a public management problem than a criminology problem. And one key to management success, as we're learning from other areas of public policy, is performance accountability. Nowhere has the accountability principle been more decisively demonstrated than in New York City's declining crime rates. The crime drop had many causes, both inside and outside the police department. But the one that stands out was the bold announcement by Police Commissioner Bill Bratton that he was willing to be held quantitatively accountable for crime reduction. Putting his own reputation on the line -- and betting it on measurable results rather than on a laundry list of specific policies or organizational changes -- enabled Bratton to hold his subordinates similarly accountable. Faced with the pressure to perform and to perform in the foreseeable future rather than in the sweet by-and-by, the New York Police Department found itself capable of astonishing accomplishments. The rate of murders went down by three-quarters and is staying down; property crime rates kept pace. For some reason, no one seems to have thought of extending this accountability revolution to corrections agencies. Yet holding corrections officials accountable for recidivism among their probationers, parolees, and prison alumni is more obviously justified than holding the police responsible for the overall crime rate. Many things influence the crime rate in a city beyond the effectiveness of its police department. But if arrests for serious new crimes are much less frequent among probationers in one probation office than among similar probationers in another office, or if the graduates of one medium-security prison are much more likely to be back inside within six months than the graduates of another, then the worse-performing institution might have something to learn from the better-performing institution. Since most crime, especially serious violent crime, is committed by repeat offenders, focusing on the offenders whose names we know needs to be central to any serious crime control strategy. Current performance wouldn't be hard to improve on. In most states, an offender leaving prison has a worse-than-even chance of staying out for three years, and there's no evidence that routine probation supervision has any crime-control benefit whatsoever. Some specific programs are known to work. Frequent drug tests for probationers and parolees, with immediate and predictable, but not severe, sanctions for every incident of drug use, can reduce hard-drug consumption, a strong predictor of recidivism. In-prison literacy programs can improve employability, and getting a job is a strong correlate of going straight. Part of the reason such commonsense approaches aren't widely adopted is that the whole project of turning offenders' lives around -- inducing them to live as citizens rather than predators -- was tainted by its association with a kindhearted but muddle-headed version of penology. When crime was low, some influential prison officials and academics tried to reinvent prisons and probation and parole agencies as primarily service institutions. The announced goal -- rehabilitation -- became entangled with what turned out to be a fundamentally wrong idea of how to achieve it, which might be summed up as "be nice to criminals and criminals will be nice to you." Over the past 35 years, a political sea change, driven by rising crime, made a hard line toward offenders the only publicly acceptable attitude. Naturally, but unfortunately, this led to the virtual abandonment of the idea that rehabilitation ought to be a central focus of prison administration. Somehow, giving up the idea of being nice to criminals came to imply giving up any intention of making them other than criminal. To talk of rehabilitation now marks a politician or corrections official as an unrealistic, soft-on-crime bleeding heart. The adversarial nature of the courtroom process fosters the illusion that criminal justice is a zero-sum game. In fact, since both crime and punishment are expensive, offenders and the rest of us have a mutual interest in offenders' turning from crime to honest work. In particular, those who portray themselves politically as advocates for the victims of crime ought to be more concerned than they seem to be with the fact that unrehabilitated criminals are future threats. Yet in the current political climate, rehabilitation, in the hardheaded sense of reducing future criminality, plays virtually no role in the design, execution, or evaluation of corrections programs. At the same time, imprisonment has exploded. We now have about 2 million people behind bars, about four times the incarceration rate of a generation ago, a level unprecedented in American history and unmatched in the developed world. Poor urban communities are being hit with a flood of prison returnees, and that flood is beginning to show up in rising crime rates, but no one is turning to the wardens and demanding that they become part of the solution. Perhaps surprisingly, the private prison industry has utterly failed to demonstrate either cost savings or reduced recidivism rates, other than by selecting the least-cost, least-likely-to-repeat offenders. Recidivism ought to be an easy case for incentive contracting, but that isn't the way private-prison contracts are drawn. And for some reason nonprofit groups have almost no participation in adult institutional corrections, though they play very important roles in dealing with juvenile offenders and in providing some post-release programming. A little not-for-profit competition based on recidivism rates might help jump-start the interest of the public systems in installing one-way exits instead of revolving doors. Of course, any contracting-out approach confronts its own challenges: building accountability into the contracts and (even harder) getting that accountability enforced in the face of the political muscle that contractors, whether for-profit or not-for-profit, virtually always wield. But whatever we do about prison privatization, the first step in reforming corrections is measuring the crime control performance of the existing corrections agencies. The case for accountability doesn't rest on any specific theory of what would bring about rehabilitation. It rests on two basic propositions: that recidivism isn't completely insensitive to the way our corrections agencies conduct themselves, and that the people who work in those agencies and run them have the skill and ingenuity to make better things happen, given the appropriate authority and the appropriate incentives. Being accountable for next month's numbers concentrates the organizational mind wonderfully; it can, at best, create a sort of every-cat-is-good-as-long-as-it-catches-mice pragmatism. Real accountability can make even ideas "not invented here" seem worth trying once. Formally, the problem is similar to the problem of bringing accountability to public education. Consider the parallels: Both the tasks are important and both are done unevenly and less than optimally. In each case, it's not hard to figure out some key things we ought to be measuring: reading ability in the schools and crimes committed by offenders in the corrections case. In neither case are those easy-to-measure things the only aspects of performance worth worrying about (we should consider curiosity among students, for example, or prisoner-on-prisoner assault, or the employment rate among probationers), and therefore both systems require multiple measures of process and outcome to avoid creating perverse incentives for managers (for example, to drop art and music classes from schools or to ignore infectious disease and other health issues in correctional settings). Since both students and offenders differ enormously among themselves and across institutions, any reasonable accountability system in either domain needs to adjust for the client mix or we just wind up punishing the institutions that get stuck with the hard cases. Random variation makes it both essential and hard to develop clever statistical measures to make sure we're not rewarding and punishing "noise" in the test scores or the crime rates. There's a tension between the need for adequate sample sizes to deal with the "noise" problem and the desirability of moving accountability down to the lowest practicable level of the organization. The more we can hold individual teachers or probation officers accountable for results, the better; but the measurement problems get harder as the numbers of cases get smaller. Dukenfield's Law ("Anything worth winning is worth cheating for") makes it necessary to guard against a variety of ways to game the scoring system. Accountability is no panacea. Probation departments, in particular, are so badly starved for both resources and authority that dramatic improvements can't really be expected without changes in budgets and laws. But right now the link between probation budgets and crime rates hasn't been established. In the absence of outcome measures that elected leaders care about, making the political case for the necessary changes will remain virtually impossible. Mayors must learn to ask, and probation commissioners must be able to answer the question, "How much will it cost me to get the re-arrest rate down by 10 percent, and what's that going to do for the overall crime rate?" When they can do that, the battle won't be won, but at least we'll be ready to start fighting it. Mark A.R. Kleiman is professor of policy studies at UCLA and chairman of BOTEC Analysis Corp. in Cambridge, Mass.

Blue Ribbon Sentencng commission collapses, by Robert Lawson, UK Law faculty.

Paschal:

Pardon me for being slow in getting back to you on this question. As we near the end of the semester, things get very busy and I have been in and out of my office for the last week and excessively busy. Sorry.

The Blue Ribbon Sentencing Commission went up in smoke, in response to organized opposition from state prosecutors (led by Ray Larson, I believe, and Attorney General Stumbo). The Commission only had two meeting, the last of which was overwhelmed by attendance of prosecutors and law enforcement types. The Commission was a good idea, had a representative membership, but never got around to considering any of the problems. It never filed a report.

I'm not sure I can identify a "contact" person for you in Frankfort. The Chief Justice (Joe Lambert) is still interested in these problems, he was the one who took the initiative to form the Blue Ribbon Sentencing Commission, but its history is described above.

If I had to identify someone who would provide hope for some kind of reform effort, I would probably identify Rep. Kathy Stein (from Lexington) or Sen. Robert Stivers (Manchester) as persons who understand the importance of these issues and might be able to withstand the pressure from anti-reform forces. As you may know, Rep. Stein is the chair of the House Judiciary Committee (where criminal law reform would locate itself); she came to see me right before the last session, got copies of my articles and indicated that she wanted to do something on this.

I think the session was so disjointed and fractured that nothing was done on anything. But I know she is interested. Senator Stivers (a Republican) is chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee; he was on the Blue Ribbon Sentencing Commission and was very unhappy about the way it collapsed. He wrote an angry letter to the Chief Justice (sending me a copy) blaming the Attorney General for the early collapse of the Commission. I have been told that there is another legislator who agrees with my assessment of the situation; he is Senator Dan Kelly from Springfield (one of the leaders in the Senate). This is the best I can do on giving you a "contact" in Frankfort.

I have been trying to get lawyers and judges interested in this problem. I have tried to generate interest in the organized bar but so far have not had a great deal of success. However, lots more of them now know about the problem than before I starting writing and preaching about the situation. And I have yet to encounter one (not in law enforcement or prosecution) who does not show concern.

The President of the Kentucky Bar Association is Robert Ewald; the Executive Director is James Deckard. Deckard was general counsel for Chief Justice Lambert when the Sentencing Commission was formed and he knows of these problems. The Kentucky Bar Association could be a significant force for motivating law and policy makers to look at reform if the Association would examine the problem (as I have asked) and take a
public position (providing some wiggle room for political leaders who must do the reform itself).

If you get your movement underway, the Bar Association would be one place where you might exert some meaningful nfluence (just by letting this group know that Bob Lawson is not the only voice of concern in this area). I think the Interfaith Alliance group would be one whose voice might be heard.

Hope this helps some. Bob Lawson

DELAWARE House OKs sentencing reform bill, Apr 4, 2007

Wednesday, April 4, 2007
Delaware House OKs sentencing reform bill
By Drew Volturo, Delaware State News

DOVER — After a lengthy debate that pitted police officers and prosecutors against defense attorneys and retired judges, the state House of Representatives passed a bill Tuesday eliminating minimum mandatory sentencing for drug offenders.

House Bill 71, which passed 26-13 after a two-hour debate, would change mandatory prison sentences to presumptive terms left to the discretion of the sentencing judge.

Under existing state law, a judge must impose the minimum mandatory sentence provided in the statute. The presiding officer cannot weigh any mitigating factors to possibly lessen the prison term.

“Minimum mandatory sentencing transfers sentencing power from judges to the prosecuting attorneys,” said Edmund N. “Ned” Carpenter II, a former defense attorney and deputy attorney general and past president of the Delaware State Bar Association.

“It gives the prosecuting attorney the power to threaten the defendant if he doesn’t plead guilty to various charges.”

House Speaker Rep. Terry R. Spence, R-New Castle, said he sponsored HB 71 because the debate surrounding minimum mandatory sentencing has been brewing for several years but never made it to the House floor.

“Hearing both sides, I felt that the time has come this year for this issue to be fully discussed on the floor,” Rep. Spence said.

“The sentiment from the majority of the House was to put the final decision in a judge’s hands.”

But members of the law enforcement community, including the attorney general’s office and the Delaware Police Chiefs’ Council, said the sentencing statute applies mainly to the “worst of the worse,” and is an effective tool for them to use.

State Prosecutor Richard Andrews said of 6,300 drug arrests in 2005, minimum mandatory sentencing was only applied to 133 convicts.

“Mandatory sentencing is being handed out to people who rightly deserve to spend at least a couple years in prison,” Mr. Andrews said.

“By weakening the drug laws, our streets are going to become more violent and we will see more crime,” said Newport Police Chief Michael Capriglione, president of the Delaware Police Chief’s Council.

Dover Police Chief Jeffrey Horvath brought props with him to testify before the House Tuesday.

The chief, who has said numerous times that he believes 90 percent of all crimes are drug-related in some fashion, held up a baggie with 10 grams of crack cocaine, which sells for $500 on the streets.

“Almost all of the shootings in Dover are related to this,” Chief Horvath said. “This is a violent crime and my stats prove it.

“Mandatory sentencing makes it fair for everyone who can’t afford a (high-priced) attorney.”

Chief Horvath said police would “have to work a hell of a lot harder” if the bill passes because drug dealers would be on the streets quicker.

Retired Wilmington police officer Rep. Dennis P. Williams, D-Wilmington, said minimum mandatory sentencing provides a necessary tool for police to get additional information from suspects and often leads to bigger arrests.

“They put themselves in this position,” Rep. Williams said. “I don’t see the big issue here. This is just a lot of fanfare.

“It’s a bad piece of legislation.”

Former state Supreme Court justice Joseph T. Walsh said judges already have a great deal of discretion in sentencing when it comes to capital murder cases. The judge can go against a 12-0 recommendation for death.

Judges, Mr. Walsh said, take that responsibility seriously.

“In each of those situations, I held a person’s liberty literally in my hand,” Mr. Walsh said. “I had an obligation to impose a fair sentence, fair to the defendant and fair to society.

“It’s a very difficult balance. With the advent of minimum mandatory sentencing, there is no balance. The focus is entirely on the offense.”

A similar measure died in the House last year when the chamber did not act on it.

Opponents to the proposal have noted that the General Assembly approved a bill a few years ago that reduced mandatory minimum sentences for lesser drug crimes, and that there’s no need for further action.

That 2003 law increased minimum mandatory sentences for violent crimes such as manslaughter, but lowered minimum terms for some drug offenses and increased the minimum weight of cocaine needed to establish the crime of trafficking from 5 grams to 10 grams.

The actual vote in the House Tuesday was delayed by about 20 minutes when legislators and attorneys couldn’t agree on how many votes were needed for passage.

The chamber typically has 41 members, which means that it would take 21 votes to pass most legislation.

But there currently are two vacancies, which raised the issue of whether it would take only 20 votes to clear the House.

Four House attorneys split in their interpretation of state law, so acting speaker Rep. William A. Oberle Jr., R-Newark, decided it would take 21 votes.

In the end, it didn’t matter, as HB 71 got 26 votes in favor.

The bill goes to the Senate for consideration.

Gov. Ruth Ann Minner said she is receptive to the idea of eliminating minimum mandatory sentencing but needs to see the final version of the legislation before deciding whether to sign it.

“We’ll see how it comes to us,” Gov. Minner said. “It has three amendments attached to it already.”

Post your opinions in the Public Issues Forum at newszap.com

Staff writer Drew Volturo

can be reached at 741-8296

or dvolturo@newszap.com

Worst Crisis in US is faced by Black Men, according to National Urban League

Published on Tuesday, April 17, 2007 by Associated Press

Group Says Worst Crisis in US Faced by Black Men

by David Crary

NEW YORK — Citing bleak data on incarceration, joblessness, and AIDS, the National Urban League said yesterday that problems facing black men represent America’s most serious social crisis and proposed an aggressive campaign to provide them with more opportunities.The 97-year-old black empowerment organization, in its annual State of Black America report, called for universal early-childhood education, more programs for dropouts and former offenders, and expanded use of all-male schools emphasizing mentoring and longer class hours.

“Empowering black men to reach their full potential is the most serious economic and civil rights challenge we face today,” said Urban League president Marc H. Morial.

“Ensuring their future is critical, not just for the African-American community, but for the prosperity, health, and well-being of the entire American family.”

According to the report, African-American men are more than twice as likely to be unemployed as white males.

They are nearly seven times more likely to be incarcerated, with average jail sentences about 10 months longer than those of white men, the report said.

In addition, it said, black males ages 15 to 34 are nine times more likely than whites to be killed by firearms and nearly eight times as likely to have AIDS.

“I could rattle off the names of African-American men who have overcome the odds . . . But for all the Barack Obamas, Tony Dungys, and Colin Powells out there . . . there are many more black men who face very limited opportunities,” Morial said.

© Copyright 2007 Associated Press

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Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/04/17/577/