https://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle-old/383/howdoyoufeel.shtml

David Borden, Executive Director, [email protected], 4/22/05

	David Borden

Imagine instead of spending the next year with your family, on your job, in school, you were to instead spend it in jail. Perhaps for violating a drug law. Imagine this morning standing in front of a judge and hearing that sentence pronounced -- not a mere fine, not just probation, not community service -- a year out of your life, a year behind bars, away from home and loved ones, in danger of victimization by other inmates. How do you feel? Probably not very good.

Imagine the sentence is 20 years. Now how do you feel?

Senseless members of Congress like Wisconsin's James Sensenbrenner have forgotten that a year of incarceration is a very harsh punishment. They feel compelled to find new and creative ways to send more people to prison for years or decades. Whether it helps the drug situation or not.

They must be stopped. The Sensenbrenner bill is a moral outrage, an Act not only of legislation but of terrible cruelty. Many, many lives will be destroyed if it passes, for no legitimate rationale and with no benefit to society. How many of the stories must be told -- how many of Sensenbrenner's own ideological allies must speak out against mandatory minimum sentencing, Chief Justice Rehnquist himself -- before the unreasonable, if unwilling to admit error, will at least back down?

Now is not the time to create new mandatory minimums. Now is the time to end mandatory minimums. The Supreme Court's rendering of sentencing guidelines as advisory to judges rather than binding was a rare act of wisdom and a beginning for the restoration of reason and justice to our criminal justice system. Entrenching the same and worse mistakes with this new bill would be ignorant at best. Mandatory minimums should be ended for the same reasons the Court struck the guidelines and more.

History may not demonize the Sensenbrenners of the world individually. But America's prison madness will indeed be remembered as a moral blindness and a blight which ruined so much life so unjustly. Those who stand up and say "no" will at least know we did our part to help right an historic wrong. Let us all join that chorus today.

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