The worst time for policymakers to make decisions is when people are angry or scared.
The resulting knee-jerk reactions are usually excessive and frequently have to be revoked or amended as the consequences of them become apparent.
This past week’s headlines were filled with scary stories about suspected killers — two of them in Memphis — who had been previously incarcerated for violent crimes but were let out before serving their full sentences.
The instant reaction was one of recrimination against a criminal justice system that has allegedly gone soft.
We have been here before.
In the 1990s, when crime was on the rise, states were incentivized by the federal government into passing truth-in-sentencing laws to require violent criminals to serve at least 85% of their sentence. Mississippi went even further than that, applying the requirement to all felonies, including nonviolent ones.
The result was an explosion in prison populations and corrections costs, as the United States became the most incarcerated nation in the world.
It took a couple of decades to recognize the unsustainability of that, and the disintegration it was causing in heavily minority communities, where the rates of incarceration are the highest. In recent years, a bipartisan coalition has emerged to support sentencing alternatives to incarceration, particularly for nonviolent offenders, and more liberal use of parole. Democrats have liked the idea because of the inhumane conditions prevalent in many prisons and their belief that the criminal justice system treats Black and brown offenders more harshly than white ones. Republicans have gotten on board, too, as a way to curb government spending and the resulting taxation.
That coalition, though, is a fragile one, and it wouldn’t take much to get it to unravel — such as the past week in Memphis.
In one shocking incident, a former convict allegedly abducted and killed a 34-year-old kindergarten teacher while the mother of two was out for an early morning jog. A few days later, another former convict put much of Memphis in lockdown as he spent hours cruising the city, shooting people apparently at random, four of them fatally.
Cleotha Henderson, the suspect accused of killing the jogger, had gotten out of prison in 2020, four years ahead of his 24-year sentence for kidnapping a Memphis attorney. The suspect in the mass shootings, Ezekiel Kelly, had been only out of prison since March, having served just 11 months of a three-year sentence for an earlier gun-related assault.
Defenders of a recently enacted truth-in-sentencing law in Tennessee have used these horrific cases to support their decision to remove the possibility of early release for certain violent offenses. There is a growing chorus to do something similar elsewhere.
Balancing public safety against public cost is never easy. Most prisons are hellholes, there’s little denying that, but they are the best place to put people who have shown themselves to be an obvious mortal danger to others.
Taking discretion out of the hands of parole officials in determining whether it’s safe to release an offender from prison ahead of schedule, however, is not the way to go.
Besides, it’s not always the parole system that produces an early release. Henderson, who served almost 85% of his sentence, was not even eligible for parole consideration based on the law in effect at the time of his sentencing. He got out four years early because of sentencing credits provided by a separate state law.
If Henderson is guilty, it’s lamentable that the corrections system did not reform him, but it probably wouldn’t have reformed him with four more years to work at it either. Whenever he got out, chances were likely someone would be victimized like this. For all we know, his long tenure in prison might have reinforced his propensity to crime.
Rather than focusing on the sensational crime cases in establishing the right mix between safety and cost, it is important to step back and consider the larger picture.
Massive incarceration is incredibly expensive and has not made this nation feel safer. Even with the modest loosening of some sentencing and parole guidelines, the United States still has the highest incarceration rate in the world. That’s not a ranking to which this nation should cling.
Admittedly, the judicial and parole systems are imperfect. Sometimes those who have the responsibility of deciding how long a person should be locked up get it wrong. Sometimes it’s too long; sometimes it’s too short.
Canadian parole officials, for example, are having a hard time explaining why Myles Sanderson, who went on a gruesome stabbing rampage last Sunday with his brother on an Indigenous reserve, was set free in February after 59 convictions and a long history of violence, including previous stabbings.
But mistakes like this are not the rule. They’re just the ones that you read about, that make you angry or scared.
And less inclined to think clearly through all the consequences of how you react to them.
- Contact Tim Kalich at 662-581-7243 or tkalich@gwcommonwealth.com.
