In The News

IN THE 1964 LANDMARK decision Wesberry v. Sanders, the U.S. Supreme Court stated that “[n]o right is more precious in a free country than that of having a voice in the election of those who make the laws under which, as good citizens, we must live. Other rights, even the most basic, are illusory if the right to vote is undermined.” Sadly, many state and local governments responded to this assessment by continuing their sordid history of blocking access to the ballot box. To ensure that American citizens were not stripped of this precious constitutional right, Congress passed and President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

After months of hype about the historic bipartisan consensus that we must make the American criminal justice system less harsh, President Obama finally signed a justice reform bill into law Monday. There’s only one problem: Instead of making the justice system more fair and less punitive, the new law will make it more vindictive and petty. Specifically, it will require people who have been convicted of sex crimes against minors to carry special passports in which their status as registered sex offenders will be marked with conspicuous identifying marks. The point of International Megan’s Law,in the words of its House sponsor Chris Smith of New Jersey, is to prevent “sex tourism” by making it harder for people to “hop on planes and go to places for a week or two and abuse little children.” In addition to the passport stamp, this goal is supposed to be achieved through the formation of a new federal unit inside of Immigration and Customs Enforcement called the “Angel Watch Center,” which will inform foreign governments when American sex offenders have made plans to visit their countries.

For far too long, politicians across the nation have chosen to play politics with crime policy by enacting so-called “tough on crime” slogans such as “three strikes and you’re out” or rhymes like “you do the adult crime, you do the adult time.” As appealing as these soundbites may be, they have done nothing to reduce crime — but they have overloaded our prisons. Research by The Pew Charitable Trusts shows that between 1980 and 2013 our federal prison population skyrocketed from 24,000 to 215,000. The United States now has around 5 percent of the world’s population, yet 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. It has gotten to the point that some recent studies have concluded that our level of over-incarceration is actually counterproductive, meaning that it destroys so many families, creates so many people with felony records and wastes so much taxpayer money that it generates more crime than it stops.

Reps. Raúl Labrador (R-Idaho) and Bobby Scott (D-Va.) have introduced legislation that would allow courts to sentence drug crime offenders on a case-by-case basis. Scott, the top Democrat on the House Education and the Workforce Committee, argued the current policy of mandatory minimum prison sentences for nonviolent drug crimes is ineffective. "Studies of mandatory minimums conclude that they fail to reduce crime, they waste the taxpayers' money, they discriminate against minorities, and they often require the imposition of sentences that violate common sense," Scott said.