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| Mukasey: Convicts released early are likely to commit crimes, the attorney general warns. Ali Abbas/Reuters/file |
As many crack convicts are freed early, will crime rise
Of the 19,500 drug offenders eligible over the next 30 years to apply for early release, 3,417 have had their sentences reduced as of Monday.
from the April 9, 2008 edition
Page 3 of 4
Mukasey's office says he stands by his earlier comments.
But many criminal-justice experts say the reduction in the disparity is long overdue.
"I would agree, like most people, that the original legislation that created the disparate sentences for crack versus powder was ill conceived," says James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston. "And therefore changes now to remedy mistakes of the past make sense."
The revised guidelines have been structured well, criminal-justice experts say, in that the decision about reducing an inmate's sentence rests with a federal judge.
"In the cases where the retroactive application of the guideline is pretty clear cut, we are getting agreement from the US attorney's office," says Miriam Conrad, federal public defender for Massachusetts and New Hampshire. "There are some cases in which the legal issues are somewhat more complex, and those are ones that it may take a little bit longer to sort out."
Still, some law-enforcement officials remain skeptical. The Fraternal Order of Police credits the tough mandatory minimum sentences with helping to bring about the reduction in crime in the 1990s. If crack-cocaine disparity is unfair, the organization says, then it would be better to increase the penalties for powder cocaine to the level of crack sentences.
"We believe that letting these people out, their presence on the street, will further harden that trend upward in the crime rate," says James Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police.
Professor Fox agrees that there is concern about releasing a large number of crack-cocaine offenders, particularly because many of those eligible for early release now are from a generation that struggled with high levels of criminality in the '80s and early '90s. But they all will be released eventually, he notes.
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