The US Sentencing Commission voted to support more and earlier heroin (and meth and PCP et al.) trafficking. It did so by deciding to make its already ill-advised all-comers-welcome reduction of the guidelines for drug sentencing fully retroactive. Here's the USSC press release.
Today I'll be flying back to the mainland from Hawaii, so I can't go into the detail this story deserves. I'll say only two things. First, the Commission's press release is astonishingly (and I have to believe intentionally) deceptive. It states:
The Commission studied offenders released early after a similar 2007 amendment to the guidelines reducing sentences for crack offenders and found that those offenders were no more likely to re-offend than offenders who had served their original sentences.
How slick is that! The newly retroactive guidelines apply to all drugs, not just the drug (crack cocaine) dealt with in the 2007 amendment. And the recidivism rate for all drugs is 77% -- an enormous figure, and more than twice the number the USSC had been trumpeting previously. In other words, slightly more than three-quarters of drug offenders return to crime. I guess it's no surprise that the actual drug recidivism rate is cleverly, if very conspicuously, invisible in the Commission's press release.
Second, one of the stated grounds for slimming down the federal criminal justice system has been its budget. But re-litigating between 40,000 and 50,000 sentences will have gigantic costs. How gigantic? Well, we don't know, because the whole cost-of-re-litigation issue is swept under the rug by the Commission -- the same Commission that undertook the guidelines reductions in the first place largely, it claimed, because of -- you guessed it -- its grave concern that costs are getting out of hand.
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