Throwing away the key
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t would be difficult to find many people who think prison sentences should not be especially long for adults who commit sex crimes against children. Anyone who would do such a thing to a child should be put away for a long time, almost all of us agree.
That's certainly the thinking behind the just-announced legislative effort to increase the minimum-mandatory sentences for child-sex offenders. A proposed bill in the Legislature's upcoming session would increase to 15 years the sentences for anyone who attempts rape, attempts rape with use of an object or attempts sodomy on a child, defined as anyone under age 13 in the Beehive State. It would increase to 25 years the sentence for anyone who actually commits rape, object rape or sodomy of a child.
The bill has support in both the House and Senate, and has been endorsed by Gov. Huntsman. Indeed, we agree with the premise that monsters who harm children in such terrible ways should, at the very least, be locked away for many years.
But saying you support toughening the penalties in theory is not quite the same as supporting it in practice. Indeed, Utah used to have minimum-mandatory sentences for sex offenders -- the law was passed in 1983. But it was repealed in 1995; the two chief arguments for repealing the law were increased cost of incarceration and the fact that the minimum-mandatory sentences allowed prosecutors to force defendants to plead guilty to lesser charges.
With the pendulum swinging back in the direction of minimum mandatories, look for these same debates to take place all over again -- we're on a 12-year cycle. The fact of the matter is, the state prison system alone cannot absorb the increase in inmate population caused by adding 10 years to the sentence of every convicted child-sex offender going forward; the state would need to begin building more prisons.
The state deals with its current overcrowding by sending inmates to various county jails to serve their time -- but generally pays the counties only between 50 percent and 70 percent of the price it would be to house them in a prison. If the sentences are increased, there will be a significantly greater demand for county jail cells, as well as prison cells. Costs will rise.
That said, perhaps Utahns will feel just fine about paying the extra tab. We don't yet know how much it would cost, since the state's legislative analysts have not attached a fiscal note -- what those of us in the private sector call a "price tag" -- to the legislation.
Prosecutors and Department of Corrections officials say just because the sentences aren't mandatory doesn't mean the parole board lets child-sex offenders out of prison early. They warn that just because TV pundits like Bill O'Reilly lambaste Utah for not increasing its minimum-mandatory sentences, as other states have, may not be the best reason to lengthen sentences for these crimes.
Like we mentioned earlier, we're all for keeping child-sex offenders locked up. But we'd feel better about our philosophical support for the legislation if the proposed bill's sponsors would affix a price tag and some research detailing how much time child-sex offenders actually are spending behind bars before they are granted parole. Depending on that information, the decision about whether to support the bill's passage may be an easy one to make.
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