Federal sentencing system is badly out of whack

[flashl]

Judges seek leeway in prison sentences

The Supreme Court will look at strict rules that are a holdover from the 1980s war on drugs and that legal activists say are unfair.

Marion Hungerford, a 52-year-old woman diagnosed with a mental illness, was convicted two years ago as an accomplice after her live-in boyfriend pleaded guilty to a series of armed robberies in Billings, Mont.

Her sentence: 159 years in federal prison.

The judge said federal sentencing rules gave him no choice. The U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco agreed, as did the U.S. Supreme Court, which in May turned away her claim that the sentence was unconstitutional.

Increasingly, judges and legal activists -- conservative and liberal -- point to cases like Hungerford's and say the federal sentencing system is badly out of whack. They are hoping that Congress or the Supreme Court will move to give judges leeway to impose shorter -- and, they say, fairer -- prison terms. The high court will hear two cases next month that challenge mandatory minimum sentences.

"The worst aspect is the utter irrationality of the system," said U.S. District Judge Paul G. Cassell from Utah, an appointee of President Bush and former law clerk to Antonin Scalia before Scalia joined the Supreme Court. "When I have to sentence a midlevel drug dealer to more time than a murderer, something is wrong."

We say "lock them up" then we hear:

Calif inmates keep dying from poor medical care, report says

As many as 66 inmates died because of poor medical care last year, according to a report released Wednesday, including a man whose treatment for "constant and extreme" chest pain was delayed eight hours.
The report released by Robert Sillen, the court-appointed receiver in charge of California prison health care, reviewed 381 deaths. It found that 18 deaths were preventable and 48 were possibly preventable, for a total of about 17 percent. The report excluded suicides and executions.

"There are just far too many horror stories that continue to occur," Sillen said.

Sillen took over the prisons' medical system in April 2006, after a federal judge found that an average of one inmate a week was dying of neglect or malpractice. Inmates have continued dying preventable deaths, according to the report, even as Sillen has begun making changes, which have cost state taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.

Aging Inmates Clogging Nation's Prisons

Razor wire topping the fences seems almost a joke at the Men's State Prison, where many inmates are slumped in wheelchairs, or leaning on walkers or canes.

It's becoming an increasingly common sight: geriatric inmates spending their waning days behind bars. The soaring number of aging inmates is now outpacing the prison growth as a whole.

Tough sentencing laws passed in the crime-busting 1980s and 1990s are largely to blame. It's all fueling an explosion in inmate health costs for cash-strapped states.

"It keeps going up and up," said Alan Adams, director of Health Services for the Georgia Department of Corrections. "We've got some old guys who are too sick to get out of bed. And some of them, they're going to die inside. The courts say we have to provide care and we do. But that costs money."

Justice Department statistics show that the number of inmates in federal and state prisons age 55 and older shot up 33 percent from 2000 to 2005, the most recent year for which the data was available. That's faster than the 9 percent growth overall.

The trend is particularly pronounced in the South, which has some of the nation's toughest sentencing laws. In 16 Southern states, the growth rate has escalated by an average of 145 percent since 1997, according to the Southern Legislative Conference.