The title of this post is the headline of this new commentary authored by Steven Zeidman in the Gotham Gazette. Here are excerpts:
Regardless what one thinks of presidential pardons, we should reflect upon a simple truth — convictions and sentences meted out at one point might not be appropriate decades later. That is especially true for many people currently serving life or massive prison sentences.
Many have argued for sentence commutations for specific classifications of people. In recent years, the Supreme Court has recognized that judges sentencing young people, even for violent crimes, must consider lack of maturity, impulsivity, and the inherent potential for change, and so reformers are asking courts to resentence those serving long prison terms for crimes committed when they were young. Many people advocate for medical parole or compassionate release for the elderly and infirm. Others focus on people deemed to be low-level, non-violent drug offenders.
At the heart of the problem, however, are all the people serving draconian sentences for crimes committed when they were adults and who are not, at least not yet, suffering from any debilitating illness or in any other “special” category. In fact, it is the “normalcy” of so many cases that highlights the issue we must confront....
Last year, the venerable American Law Institute, a non-governmental organization of judges, lawyers and academics, approved the first-ever revisions to the historic Model Penal Code. The MPC, taught in virtually every law school, was developed in 1962 to introduce uniformity and coherence to the myriad criminal codes in the 50 states, and serves as a model across the country. The update to the Code took more than 15 years to complete and yielded a comprehensive 700-page report.
The ALI focused specifically on sentencing in order to address the decades of punitiveness that led to the current state of mass incarceration, made all the more shameful by the significant racial disparities in American jails and prisons. One recommendation in particular addresses the epidemic of 2.2 million people behind bars. The Code now calls for state legislatures to enact a “second look” provision; to create a mechanism to reexamine a person’s sentence after 15 years no matter the crime of conviction or how long the original sentence. If the original sentence remains unchanged, it would be revisited every ten years thereafter.
While many will sound the alarm for “truth-in-sentencing” or the need for finality, the second-look provision asks a very basic question — are the purposes of sentencing better served by a sentence modification or by adhering to the original sentence imposed many years earlier? The commentary to the Code cites a host of utilitarian reasons why long sentences should not be frozen in time, suggesting that “governments should be especially cautious” and act with “a profound sense of humility” when depriving people of their freedom for most of their adult lives.
The commentary notes further that new developments might show that old sentences are no longer empirically valid, as current risk assessment methods claim to be better at predicting risk of recidivism than those previously used. Similarly, new rehabilitative approaches might be discovered for people who at the time of their sentencing were thought resistant to change.
The second-look provision is bold and unprecedented — to actually redress the past 50 years of mass incarceration requires nothing less, as most proposed criminal justice solutions and reforms are prospective and have no impact on those people currently in prison. Further, executive clemency in the form of sentence commutation has also proven to be of limited utility as Presidents and Governors are loath to exercise this power to any serious and meaningful degree.
Second-look allows for mid-course correction if warranted by some measure of changed circumstances -- major changes in the offender, his family situation, the crime victim, or the community — that merit a different sentence. It is consistent with the growth of restorative justice that seeks to move away from the punishment paradigm of the last several decades. Second-look also allows the sentencing determination to be made in a calmer atmosphere than existed at the time of the original sentencing, so that any notoriety, outside pressure, or inflamed passions may have abated.
Bills have been introduced in the New York State Legislature regarding parole eligibility for people who are least 55 years old and have served at least 15 years of their sentence, and while the devil may be in the details, they are not insurmountable. There will be costs associated with establishing second-look processes but money will ultimately be saved as more people are sent home. Releasing people from prison is often controversial and even one crime committed by a releasee can threaten to shut down any second-look process, so there must be carefully constructed guidelines, created by myriad stakeholders, to ensure the independence of the decision-makers, and that all decisions are consistent, defensible, and transparent.
Mass incarceration is not just about unnecessarily incarcerating masses of people. It is about unnecessarily keeping masses of people in prison for decades. A sentence once imposed is not thereby automatically rendered, just, fair and appropriate in perpetuity. Ultimately, second-look mechanisms are meant to recognize and value the possibility of change and transformation, and to intervene when drastically long sentences are indefensible.
Regular readers should know that I am a big fan of second-look sentencing mechanisms, so I am a fan of this commentary even though it does not fully engage with the reality that second-look provisions in the new MPC are only critical because of the MPC's advocacy for abolishing parole mechanisms. Parole mechanisms (as well as robust use of clemency powers) served for the bulk of the 20th Century to help address many of the problems identified in this commentary. That said, I would favor a world with both a well-structured parole mechanism and second-look sentence provisions so that both the executive branch (via parole) and the judicial branch (via resentencings) can and will review the propriety and necessity of a sentence over time.
I have written about a number of second-look concerns and related issues in a a number of article through the years, and here is just a sampling of these writings:
- "Re-Balancing Fitness, Fairness, and Finality for Sentences"
- "Reflecting on Parole's Abolition in the Federal Sentencing System"
- "Encouraging (and Even Requiring) Prosecutors to be Second-Look Sentencers"
- "Leveraging Marijuana Reform to Enhance Expungement Practices"
- "Turning Hope-and-Change Talk Into Clemency Action for Non-Violent Drug Offenders"
- "Exploring the Theory, Policy and Practice of Fixing Broken Sentencing Guidelines"
- "The Enduring (and Again Timely) Wisdom of the Original MPC Sentencing Provisions"
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