Legal Commentary

Mukasey and Bush : Fear Mongering

By Jeralyn

Attorney General Michael Mukasey has announced the Bush Administration will give $200 million to state and local governments to fight crime. Among his reasons:

Mukasey also rapped U.S. Sentencing Commission plans to allow some 19,500 federal prison inmates, most of them black, to seek reductions in their crack cocaine sentences. The attorney general described many of the inmates as violent gang members who could threaten public safety if released sooner than initially expected.

"A sudden influx of criminals from federal prison into your communities could lead to a surge in new victims as a tragic but predictable result," Mukasey told the mayors.

Only a small percentage of those 19,500 inmates will get any benefit from the change. For those that do, in most cases, the average sentence reduction is expected to be about 16 months. Many of those serving these draconian sentences are not violent criminals but drug offenders unlucky enough to have been caught possessing or selling the wrong drug.

Bush and Mukasey should have put the $200 million into drug treatment and offender re-entry programs. It would be far better spent and of greater ultimate benefit both to the inmates being released and the communities that receive them.

I guess this shows Mukasey, like Bush, intends to continue to be tough rather than smart about crime. [More....]

The department also is pressing Congress for tougher laws to give federal prosecutors more power to crack down on crime. "Every criminal taken off the streets is one less who's committing new crimes," Mukasey said.

Full post as published by TalkLeft on January 24, 2008 (boomark / email).