If politicians weren't such craven, cautious creatures, the sentencing guidelines would have been revised years ago. And even now, I'll restrain my joy until such time when legislation rectifying abuses of the justice system actually passes.
Sentencing Guidelines Face New Scrutiny - WSJ.com With Democrats poised to take control of Congress, law-enforcement officials are preparing to defend two decades of federal sentencing policies that mandated harsh prison terms on a variety of crimes and led to a boom in the prison population.Michigan Rep. John Conyers, the incoming chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and Rep. Robert Scott (D., Va.) have already said they plan hearings early in the term to look at how nonviolent drug offenders are punished under mandatory minimum laws.
An early target will be the prison terms mandated by Congress for crack-cocaine convictions. Under current law, someone caught with five grams of crack gets a five-year sentence, while it takes 500 grams of powder cocaine to trigger the same sentence, even though there is no physiological difference. Critics have long maintained that the law unfairly targets African-American communities, where crack is more prevalent. In contrast, suburban white users tend to prefer cocaine in its powder form.
Mr. Conyers has called the crack-cocaine sentences the “most outrageous example of the unfairness of mandatory minimums.”
Here's the main cause of my skepticism:
...Reversing drug laws, though, is politically dangerous, for it risks angering law-enforcement officials and police unions. In addition, it could resurrect the soft-on-crime mantra that Republicans have long used to bludgeon Democrats. As a result, some Democrats might be reluctant to be viewed as rolling back harsh sentences just when the nation's violent crime is starting to rise.“Whenever you suggest somebody's sentence is too long or a policy is too draconian, the immediate reaction in the political arena is you're soft on crime and you're not taking public safety seriously,” says Alexander Busansky, director of the Washington office of the Vera Institute of Justice, a criminal-justice reform organization based in New York.
...law-enforcement officials -- from the Justice Department to police groups -- are joining forces to oppose any changes that decrease the severity of the crack penalty, warning that it's a slippery slope that could weaken other mandatory sentences
Insight into how politics works: there is no such thing as reform for the public good, there are only partisan bludgeons. So, the phony War on Drugs continues to sap resources from the nation, with no end in sight. Nanny state indeed.
