With concern growing about the cost — both economic and social — of incarceration, lawmakers have turned an eye to sentencing reform. But prospects for wholesale changes to sentencing in the US are dim, primarily because of the difficulty of selling “weaker” criminal punishments to a skeptical public.
This year, the Obama administration backed sentencing reform for crack cocaine, reducing the disparity between crack sentences and powder cocaine sentences on the basis that they discriminated along racial lines. But, as law professor Andrea Lyon noted at the Huffington Post, even that reform allowed for large disparities in sentences. “What was a 100 to 1 disparity is now ‘only’ an 18 to 1 disparity,” she writes.
In Missouri, an innovative new law gives judges access to information about incarceration costs before they decide on punishment, as well as access to information on recidivism rates for various crimes. Lawmakers hope it will result in a more consistent application of the law.
Marijuana law reform could also have an impact, by simply reducing the number of crimes for which people can be jailed. Last year alone, there were more than 858,000 arrests in the United States for marijuana. That’s down from a peak of 872,000 in 2007, but still near record highs. More than half of all drug arrests involved marijuana.
This Article Appeared in The Black Truth News Volume 2 Issue 1 December 2010