SECTION: METRO; TOM TEEPEN; Pg. 7

LENGTH: 529 words

HEADLINE: A little late, isn't it?

BYLINE: Tom Teepen

BODY:
Now he tells us.

In a wide-ranging interview published 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."

Clinton calls for re-thinking laws that require mandatory prison sentences and guidelines that call for long sentences even despite mitigating factors. That's especially so with drug laws that are filling 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," the president 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, 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 in states that deny the vote to ex-felons are contributing to a new black disenfranchisement just as surely if not as broadly as the old Jim Crow laws did.

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.

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Tom Teepen is an Atlanta-based columnist for Cox Newspapers. His e-mail address is teepencolumn@coxnews.com.

LOAD-DATE: December 23, 2000