Copyright 2000 The Baltimore Sun Company
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The Baltimore Sun
December 12, 2000 Tuesday FINAL EDITION
SECTION: EDITORIAL, Pg. 33A
LENGTH: 524 words
HEADLINE: A
fine Clinton idea, but it came too late
BYLINE: Tom
Teepen
DATELINE: ATLANTA
BODY:
ATLANTA - Now he tells us.
In an interview in the current Rolling
Stone, President Clinton, in arguably his most emphatic passage, delivers a
telling soliloquy on the need for broad
criminal justice
reform. It is a message long overdue in our cramped political
discourse. "We really need," the president says, "a re-examination of our entire
policy on imprisonment."
The United States imprisons a larger proportion
of its population than any other nation. It is doing so with a worsening racial
disproportion. It metes out sentences typically longer than those for the same
crimes in most other countries and, as the president notes, we do little to
prepare our ever-growing population of ex-convicts to succeed after prison.
Prison systems have largely abandoned any serious effort at
rehabilitation in favor simply of punishing prisoners - and it shows in chilling
recidivism rates. Small surprise. When you brutalize people, as our prisons in
effect do, you don't get better people. You just get brutalized people.
The president says, "Keep in mind - 90 percent of the people that are in
the penitentiary are going to get out. So society's real interest is to see that
we maximize the chance that when they get out, they can go back to being
productive citizens. That they'll get jobs, they'll pay taxes, they'll be good
fathers and mothers, and they'll do good things."
Mr. Clinton calls for
rethinking laws that require mandatory prison sentences and guidelines that call
for long sentences even despite mitigating factors. That's especially so with
drug laws, which are filing prisons with nonviolent offenders.
"Some
people deliberately hurt other people, and they ought to be in jail because they
can't be trusted to be on the streets. Some people do things that are so serious
they have to be put in jail to discourage other people from doing similar
things," he says.
"But a lot of people are in prison today because they
have drug problems or alcohol problems. ... There are tons of people in prison
who are nonviolent offenders - who have drug-related charges that are directly
related to their own drug problems." And, Mr. Clinton notes, many never receive
drug treatment before their release.
To boot, laws that punish the use
of crack cocaine, more common in the black community than the white, far more
harshly than the use of powder cocaine favored by whites are increasing the
racial tilt in prison populations. And that's happening in states that deny the
vote to ex-felons, as most do, contributing to a new black disenfranchisement
just as surely if not as broadly as the old Jim Crow laws did.
Mr.
Clinton tried to right at least that one wrong on his watch, but Republicans in
Congress rebuffed him.
The Rolling Stone interview is only one stroke in
what is likely to be a serial valedictory by President Clinton. He may have
other good ideas to leave us with.
And, who knows, maybe one day we'll
get lucky and hear some of them from a politician coming into office, instead of
from one leaving.
Tom Teepen is a columnist for Cox Newspapers. His
e-mail is teepencolumn@coxnews.com.
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December 13, 2000