Kristof: U.S. incarceration policy is ruining too many lives
Nicholas Kristof says federal law that sentences nonviolent offenders to life in prison without parole is a basic violation of human rights.
Updated 6:40 pm, Friday, November 15, 2013
So you're a judge, and Sharanda P. Jones comes before you for sentencing for conspiracy to distribute crack cocaine. She's a 32-year-old mom with a 9-year-old daughter and no prior arrests, but she has been caught up in a drug sweep that has led to 105 arrests in her Texas town of Terrell, east of Dallas. Everyone arrested is black.
There are no drugs found on Jones, but her supposed co-conspirators testify against her in exchange for reduced sentences. The whole case is dubious, but she has been convicted. What's your sentence? You have little choice. Given the presumptions of the case, she gets a mandatory minimum sentence of life without the possibility of parole. Jump to today and already Jones has spent 14 years in prison and is expected to die behind bars - for a first offense.
At a time when the United States has been slashing preschool programs, we have also been spending vast sums to incarcerate thousands of nonviolent offenders in life sentences without the possibility of parole. These cases underscore that our mass incarceration experiment has resulted in monstrous injustice and waste - a waste of tax dollars and of human lives. Judges and prison officials are rebelling at the injustice of our justice system. Here's what Judge James R. Spencer, a federal district judge, said when sentencing a former FBI informant to life without parole for selling crack cocaine to support his own addiction: "A life sentence for what you have done in this case is ridiculous; it is a travesty."
But federal law on mandatory minimums left Spencer no leeway.
Here are some other nonviolent offenders serving life sentences without the possibility of parole:
Ricky Minor, a meth addict and father of three, was found with 1.2 grams of meth in his home, along with over-the-counter decongestants that can be used to manufacture meth. He was initially charged under Florida law and says he faced a 2 1/2-year sentence. Later indicted under federal law, he pleaded guilty because his public defender said that otherwise the prosecutors would also pursue his wife, leaving no one to raise their children. Minor had several prior nonviolent offenses, for which he had never served time, and these required Judge Clyde Roger Vinson to sentence him to life without parole. Vinson said that the sentence "far exceeds whatever punishment would be appropriate."
Dicky Joe Jackson was a trucker whose 2-year-old son, Cole, needed a bone-marrow transplant to save his life. The family raised $50,000 through community fundraisers, not nearly enough for the transplant, and Jackson tried to earn the difference by carrying meth in his truck. He has now been in prison for the last 17 years; when he lost his last appeal, he divorced his wife of 19 years so that she could start over in her life. The federal prosecutor in the case acknowledged: "I saw no indication that Mr. Jackson was violent, that he was any sort of large-scale narcotics trafficker or that he committed his crimes for any reason other than to get money to care for his gravely ill child."
Danielle Metz became pregnant at 17 and later married an abusive man who was also a drug dealer. To placate him, she says, she sometimes helped him by fetching cocaine or collecting money from Western Union. After one clash in which he punched her in the face, she took the kids and left him. Two months later, she was indicted. She says that she was prosecuted primarily to induce her to testify against her husband but that she wasn't knowledgeable enough to have useful information to trade for a reduced sentence. She has now spent more than 20 years in prison.
Those examples come from a devastating new report, "A Living Death," by the American Civil Liberties Union. It identified more than 3,200 such nonviolent offenders sentenced to die behind bars. Four out of five are black or Hispanic. Virtually all are poor. Many had dismal legal counsel. Some were convicted of crimes committed when they were juveniles or very young adults.
These people are victims of the United States' disastrous experiment in mass incarceration. From the 1930s through the early 1970s, we incarcerated people at a steady rate. Since then, incarceration rates have roughly quintupled. This country imprisons people at more than five times the rates of most Western countries. I write often about human rights abuses abroad. But when we take young, nonviolent offenders - some of them never arrested before - and sentence them to die in prison, it's time for Americans who care about injustice to gaze in the mirror.
Kristof is a New York Times columnist.