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A fitting and overdue call for "conservatives to take ownership of prison reform"

By Douglas A. Berman

This op-ed by Ross Douthat in today's New York Times, which is titled "Prisons of Our Own Making," is the best and most-important piece of post-Clemmons commentary I have seen in the weeks since Mike Huckabee has been pilloried for granting clemecny to a prisoner who, a decade later, went on a horrific murder spree.  Here are excerpts: If you?re a governor with presidential aspirations, you should never, under any circumstances, pardon a convict or reduce a sentence.  That?s the lesson everyone seems to have drawn from the dreadful case of Maurice Clemmons, an Arkansas native who murdered four Lakewood, Wash., police officers over Thanksgiving weekend ? nine years after Mike Huckabee, then governor, commuted his sentence and the Arkansas parole board set him free...continue to full post

Full post as published by Sentencing Law and Policy on December 14, 2009 (boomark / email).