Over the weekend, while Steve and I and another friend were sipping cocoa in the car after some backcountry skiing, the conversation turned political. At one point, our friend asked me a few questions about John Ashcroft, and I was surprised and concerned once again to realize how little most non-lawyers in America understand about the role -- and power -- of the Attorney General. This friend is very well-educated, and quite knowledgeable about many issues. Yet he had no idea that the Attorney General is a member of the Cabinet and the country's chief legal officer. He was completely unaware of Ashcroft's role in many post-9/11 assaults on our civil liberties (though he was aware of and angry about the incursions themselves).
Inevitably, the conversation led to my pet-peeve topic of federal sentencing. The guys were appropriately dismayed to learn that in recent months, Congress has stripped federal judges of almost all of the scant discretion they retained in sentencing federal offenders. They were suitably appalled upon hearing of Ashcroft's recent policy requiring Assistant United States Attorneys to pursue the most severe potentially-provable charges against all accused offenders, and to plead out cases only if the plea agreement includes the offense that results in the longest possible sentence, particularly where a mandatory minimum sentence is available.
Steve asked me why Ashcroft and company believe that imposing lengthy prison terms on small-time drug dealers is politically expedient? Why Congress and the President believe that being "tough on crime" means wasting enormous resources on turning into career criminals those who might well be rehabilitated? But I don't know the answer; the logic escapes me.
I do know the results. A generation of children is growing up without fathers (and in many cases, mothers). Thousands of individuals are rotting away in prisons who could, through drug counseling, job training, mentoring, and other guidance, become contributing members of our economy and society. An army of federal prosecutors are earning comfortable salaries and launching political careers by pushing cases through the system by rote, rarely exercising independent judgment or using creative legal reasoning. And millions of taxpayer dollars are being spent on this so-called war on crime, while the government continues to short-change education, health care, vocational training, and other programs that might actually reduce criminality.
I wish I had the answer to Steve's question, but I don't. In this excellent editorial, Stuart Taylor suggests that Bush and Ashcroft are pandering to voters' collective punitive instincts. Yet I choose to believe that things might be different if more Americans understood the impact that excessive prosecutions and harsh sentences work on their communities and their pocketbooks. And I continue to believe that a change in administration will bring a turn-around to some, if not all, of the Bush/Ashcroft regime's wasteful and damaging policies.
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