Law professor predicts reforms in system.

Byline: BILL BISHOP The Register-Guard

With the crime rate falling, the prison population climbing and popular state services squeezed by budget cutting, the public may be ready to take a hard-nosed look at its get-tough approach to crime, says Robert Mosteller, a Duke University law professor and this year's holder of the Wayne Morse Chair on Law and Politics at the University of Oregon.

But instead of a stampede of reformers, Mosteller predicts coalitions of various interest groups will push for step-by-step changes aimed at reducing costs and increasing effectiveness in the criminal justice system.

The most likely reforms may be in crime prevention and returning some of the discretion stripped from judges by mandatory sentencing laws created during two decades of tough-on-crime politicking, he said in an interview.

"The political landscape is not going to change quickly," said Mosteller, a nationally known legal scholar and writer who focuses much of his research on criminal sentencing policies.

As part of his tenure in the Wayne Morse Chair, Mosteller will deliver a public lecture and question-and-answer session on sentencing issues next week.

While sentencing reform often is seen as a clash between liberal and conservative ideology, Mosteller said practicality will likely forge coalitions that defy familiar political labels as groups team up to restore state services cuts by reducing the cost of corrections.

For example, supporters of public schools may find allies among religious and nonprofit groups to promote lower-cost restorative justice programs that involve the community, the victim and the offender to make amends for a crime while keeping the offender in the community.

While state budget cutting will motivate some criminal justice reformers, others will focus on the effect of a flood of long-term inmates returning to the community after serving prison terms mandated by the get-tough sentencing policies of the past decade, Mosteller said.

More than 300 of Oregon's Measure 11 offenders have been released so far and the number will grow to 5,000 within 10 years.

Taxpayers will face the cost of helping ex-convicts reintegrate into the community or the more costly consequences of failing to help them and then paying all the costs of their repeat offenses, he said.

"Since we are locking people up for so long, they'll be more cut off from the community when they come back. That tends to cause more problems," Mosteller said. "This isn't being 'soft on crime.' The time has been served. We're going to have to focus more attention on reintegrating these people as a matter of necessity. It's going to be a national problem."

Mosteller said his talk will be an effort to move beyond the sound-bite debate of politicians and the crime-of-the-day sensationalism of mass media to reach a real debate about the effects of criminal justice policy and what people really want.

"I'm a little bit more optimistic that we're going to take a hard-nosed look. At a time when crime rates are high, we couldn't have this conversation. If we weren't facing a budget crisis, we wouldn't be quite as interested," he said. "It's a time when the public can focus on this."

ROBERT MOSTELLER

Lecture: 7 p.m. Tuesday in Room 175 at the William W. Knight Law Center, 1515 Agate St. in Eugene.