DN Editorial: THE SOFT CELL: Going easier on low-level drug offenders makes sense, saves dollars

HAD SOMEONE asked us last week to close our eyes and imagine the conservative response if the Obama administration were to suggest softening the government's approach to prosecuting some low-level drug offenders, we know what we would have pictured: Talking heads hyperventilating about the administration being "soft on crime" and predictions of American streets running with blood.

We would have been wrong.

In a speech Monday to the American Bar Association, Attorney General Eric Holder described a "fundamentally new approach" to federal drug prosecution. Saying that "too many Americans go to too many prisons for far too long, and for no truly good law-enforcement reason," Holder announced that he had ordered federal prosecutors to stop charging low-level, nonviolent drug offenders with crimes that require harsh mandatory-minimum sentences. He announced other changes, too, such as an expansion of "compassionate release" policies for elderly inmates who committed nonviolent crimes.

The response to this announcement, from all quarters, was basically nods of agreement. That's because the truth of the broken justice system has become just too obvious to deny.

Holder has effectively commuted the 40-year sentence of mandatory minimums for nonviolent drug crimes that did nothing to solve either the country's drug problem or the crime problem. Holder pointed out that America incarcerates far too many people (a quarter of the world's prisoners are in the U.S.) in too few prisons (the federal system is at 40 percent above capacity) at too great a cost ($80 billion in 2010 alone).

About half the 219,000 federal inmates are in for drug offenses. Most do not pose a serious threat to society.

But the prison system is a threat to them. It is dangerous and difficult. It separates them from their families and communities, and inserts them into a network and culture made up exclusively of other inmates.

Consequently, in many cases, society's attempt to remove a threat has the perverse effect of creating a threat. As the conservative group Right on Crime has noted, prisons can "have the unintended consequence of hardening nonviolent, low-risk offenders - making them a greater risk to the public than when they entered."

Certainly too many Philadelphians have watched a family member enter the criminal-justice system and come out angrier, more violence-prone and lost.

The fact that this country transforms people this way is a stain. That something is now actually getting done about it is good news. It's also sad. Holder's new policy can't give years back to people who were unnecessarily imprisoned. It can't give children who grew up without access to their incarcerated parents the chance to go back and grow up again.

There are more steps to be taken on this issue. Prison conditions need to be improved, new alternatives to incarceration need to be explored. The administration can't go back in time and make these changes sooner. But it can, and should, do more going forward.