Politicians are eager to appear as being tough on crime, but laws mandating harsh, one-size-fits-all sentencing are hurting American society, not to mention many of the people who fall in the criminal justice system.
That is the argument of former federal Judge Kevin H. Sharp, who was obliged to sentence defendants to long terms in prison when he knew a different treatment would bring better results for the accused and for society as a whole. The automatic sentences written into federal law, with no regard to individual histories and circumstances prompted him to resign as chief judge of the Middle District of Tennessee, he told The Rotary Club of McMinnville last week.
“Harsh sentences are not what’s needed” in many cases, said Sharp, who was nominated to the federal bench by President Obama in 2010 and then confirmed unanimously by the Senate in 2011. America needs to understand one of the major factors in criminal justice is opioid addiction and the illegal sale of drugs, he said. 
“Intervention and treatment,” Sharp said, would go a long way toward actually rehabilitating the accused and returning to them to their families and communities as economically productive and self-reliant citizens. It would also greatly reduce the cost burden to taxpayers for incarceration, often for repeat offenders who were not prepared by drug treatment and skills training before their release back into society.
The politically conservative Cato Institute, in fact, has asked Sharp for advice on crafting policy positions on drug rehab and education and skills development to combat the immensely costly wave of recidivism. As the Warren County Commission prepares to spend upwards of $6 million to expand its jail, other communities throughout the country are looking to fight crime before it has a chance to start — including intervention programs and early childhood literacy efforts for at-risk children and their families.
“Every state that that abolished mandatory sentencing minimums saw the crime rates go down,” Sharp emphasized.
Some defendants, he said, are plainly “bad people” and others are “dangerous.”  Those definitely must be locked up and kept away from society. But judges need to be able to consider individual differences and apply the law with informed discretion, the Rotary speaker stressed.
“We’ve got to get away from mandatory minimum sentences,” Sharp said. The taxpayer money spent on incarceration and the private, for-profit probation industry could be much more effectively devoted to managed drug rehabilitation and to early-childhood education and intervention.
Underscoring the economic impact of untreated addiction, he noted Los Angeles County Hospital reported its costs of dealing with opioid problems over a five-year period amounted to some $600 million.
In an extended “Focus” interview this week on McMinnville public radio WCPI 91.3, Sharp further discusses what he describes as the misguided and counterproductive ideologies of mandatory minimum sentencing.  That program airs Wednesday at 5:05 a.m.; Thursday at 1 p.m.; and Friday at 1:05 a.m.