The Senate Judiciary Committee quietly voted 8-0 last week in favor of a bill that would allow judges some judicial discretion in murder cases where a reasonable claim of self-defense can be made. The bill, objected to by prosecutors for obvious reasons, will now go before the full Senate.
What is so surprising about the Senate panel's embracing the idea that not all crimes and defendants warrant identically severe punishments is that such forward thought bucks an extraordinary trend to the contrary. For more than 20 years, the way in which politicians and the public have viewed crime in this country has been uniformly harsh with little or no room for exceptions.
Mandatory sentencing, truth-in-sentencing and three-strikes laws have become the norm in our effort to be "tough on crime." They've replaced any effort at reducing prison populations and costs or even maintaining the appearance of fairness in the American justice system. With the latter example being held as constitutional in a horribly misguided U.S. Supreme Court decision a year ago, the way was certainly paved for more of this nonsense. As you may recall, the court ruled against two men sentenced to life for stealing golf clubs and videos.
The results of this bafflingly popular punitive approach have been more arrests, more convictions and, ultimately, a more costly correctional system.
Last semester, I wrote a column railing Gov. Napolitano's proposal to solve Arizona's overcrowded prison system by throwing more money at the problem - $753 million over the next 15 years. The obvious drawback to spending a ridiculous sum of money on prison expansion is that it does nothing to address the causes of overcrowding (i.e. mandatory sentencing for certain felony convictions).
As if to punctuate this point, The Associated Press ran a story on Monday detailing the growing number of elderly prisoners in America's jails and the costs associated with keeping them locked up. Keeping people in jail longer has caused the over-50 prison crowd to double over the last 10 years - to 121,000 in 2002 - according to Department of Justice statistics. The department estimates the cost per elderly prisoner to be in the neighborhood of $70,000 per year compared with "only" $19,505 for the average Arizona inmate. The higher costs are mostly a reflection of health costs for elderly prisoners.
Still, prevailing thought remains that heavy-handed tactics and disproportionately harsh sentences are a means to deter crime by setting an example and nothing that the criminals don't deserve anyway (never mind the question of whether the public deserves the costs).
While moving away from hard and fast sentencing requirements with respect to murder is an undeniably good thing, murder convictions account for only a fraction of the cases where mandatory sentences are cause for concern (read: drug offenses). So, we've still got a long way to go. In the meantime, just mull over the fact that it costs more per year to incarcerate someone in this state than it does educate them at ASU, and officials are still dragging their feet to keep inmates locked up for as long as possible.
Scott Phillips is a justice studies senior. Reach him at scott.phillips@asu.edu.
