This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2015, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
When a liberal (by Utah standards) Democrat in Salt Lake City and a conservative (even by Utah standards) Republican in Washington are not only following the same path, but making a serious effort to lead others in the same direction, it is clear that a long-overdue tipping point has been reached.
In just the last few days, both U.S. Sen. Mike Lee (R-Tea Party) and Salt Lake County Mayor Ben McAdams (D-People's Republic of Salt Lake City) have taken to their respective bully pulpits to call for a major rethinking, and active rearranging, of how our national and local criminal justice systems work.
These ideas, already heeded to a serious degree by the Utah Legislature, center on the painfully learned lesson that just locking lots of people up rarely means throwing away the key. It means spending a lot of money to house and feed people, only to return them to our streets and neighborhoods at least as damaged as they were before, no less likely to commit more crimes but perhaps doing so more skillfully, or with more anger, than they did the first time.
Thus has Lee been working long and hard, finding allies among rival Democrats and taking flak from fellow Republicans, to re-write federal rules to do away with some of the draconian mandatory minimum sentences now on the books. Those guidelines take proper discretion away from judges and result in decades-long prison terms for people who do not deserve them, usually low-level drug runners.
As former U.S. Attorney for Utah Brett Tolman told a congressional committee Monday, sentencing reform is anything but getting "soft on crime." It is, or would be, getting smart about dealing with crime.
The next day, McAdams devoted much of his annual budget message to the County Council to a plan to continue a 20-year-old tax levy that paid for the county jail and use the $9.4 million a year it raises to fund a new way of dealing with crime and criminals.
It would add to the staff of the sheriff's and district attorney's offices, boost the county's contribution to public defenders and, mostly, go into Pay for Success programs that would address the root causes of much crime, including mental illness and substance abuse, homelessness and poor health among mothers and young children.
Of course, all that would be a lot easier, and cheaper, if only state officials had expanded Medicaid and used those millions to pay for treating emotional and drug abuse problems. But there you are.
This re-thinking of our criminal justice system at the federal, state and local levels is long overdue. But it is very good news indeed to see that the clear benefits of it are obvious to people up and down the ideological spectrum. And to public officials of all stripes in Utah.