New Sentencing Rules Still Don't Fix the System's Flaws

Amir Efrati wrote a blurb of an article for the Wall Street Journal that indicated the U.S. Sentencing Commission passed new rules on April 30 that will allow federal judges to consider military service, age, mental conditions, and emotional conditions of offenders before the judge imposes sentences. If the judge finds the individual conditions of a defendant warrant leniency at sentencing, the new rules provide judges with discretion to impose a less stringent sentence. The new rule will not take effect until after November 1st of this year. In his article, Mr. Efrati wrote that some judges and defense attorneys cheered the move, however I find the new rules grossly inadequate and an appallingly feeble step toward the type of sweeping, purposeful reform needed within the federal criminal justice system.

The obvious first weakness of the rule change is that it only applies to defendants who will face sentencing after November 1, 2010. Yet our federal prison system currently confines more than 200,000 prisoners, many of whom have been incarcerated for many, many years. The rule changes do not provide even a modicum of relief for them, thus continuing one of the fatal flaws of our federal criminal justice system: its finality.

When imposing a sentence of five years, ten years, or longer on a defendant, the judge only evaluated the offender's criminal conduct. Yet society has a vested interest in how the offender will emerge from prison. Our bloated prison system will continue to churn out repeating cycles of failure until leaders emerge in America with enough courage to introduce meaningful prison reform. The types of tepid changes proposed by the U.S. Sentencing Commission fail to give judges or administrators any opportunity to evaluate the steps an offender who is already incarcerated may have taken to reconcile with society or earn freedom. In fact, the federal prison system neither measures nor rewards efforts federal prisoners make to prepare for law-abiding lives upon release — parole was abolished in 1984 for all federal prisoners convicted of a crime, whether violent or not.

The current sentencing system has been in place since 1987, longer than 22 years. During those two decades America's prison system has grown by 400%, making it a human warehouse. Senator Jim Webb has called it a national disgrace. To fund this massive growth, leaders have diverted funds from education, health care, and other social service budgets. It's time to sound the call for smaller government, and American taxpayers should look closely at the federal prison system — while 80% of American school districts lay off teachers, our prisons continue to swell, confining non-violent offenders of victimless crimes for decades.

Photo Credit: The U.S. Army