Eric Holder’s ideas for locking up fewer Americans are welcome, but do not go far enough
AS DRUG dealers go, Ricky Minor was hardly a kingpin. Police found 1.2 grams of methamphetamine in his home—enough to keep a heavy user high for a day. They also found matches, acetone and cold medicine, so the Drug Enforcement Administration guessed that he could have made another 192 grams of the stuff. Mr Minor, a cash-strapped addict, pleaded guilty. He had never been to prison before, but he had convictions for selling small quantities of marijuana and cocaine, shouting at a neighbour who had poisoned his dog, shoving a police officer and driving while intoxicated. He was condemned to life in prison without any chance of parole. The judge said the sentence was wildly excessive, but under mandatory-minimum sentencing laws, he had to impose it.
This week Eric Holder, Barack Obama’s attorney-general, declared that America has an “unnecessarily large prison population”. That is putting it mildly. The Land of the Free has 5% of the world’s population, but 25% of its prisoners. In all, about 2.2m Americans fester behind bars: one in every 107 adults. Minor crimes are punished severely, serious ones ferociously. The cost is staggering: $80 billion a year, or $35,000 per inmate; not to mention “human and moral costs that are impossible to calculate”, as Mr Holder put it. America’s prisons are often harsher than those in other rich countries, as the protests against solitary confinement in California illustrate.
For decades American politicians have assumed that mass incarceration works, wooing voters with ever-tougher sentencing laws. The dramatic fall in crime since the 1990s has persuaded many that they were right. Locking up the worst criminals while they are young, fit and dangerous clearly makes America safer. But keeping sad cases like Mr Minor incarcerated past pensionable age serves little purpose. Prison has diminishing returns, and America long ago passed the point where jailing more people makes sense. As Mr Holder said, the system is “both ineffective and unsustainable”. Not before time, he has proposed some ways to reform it.
