USA -- It is an immodest goal for a freshman senator: Reshape America’s entire criminal justice system. But Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., waded boldly into the task Thursday, declaring the present system a “national disgrace” in need of a radical overhaul.

It is also a politically risky goal. Webb has moved to minimize the risk by reaching wide across the political spectrum for support.

The bill he introduced in March to create a blue-ribbon criminal justice reform commission has attracted 28 Senate co-sponsors. They are mostly Democrats, but the list also includes a few prominent Republicans, such as Orrin Hatch of Utah and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.

The witness list at the fi rst subcommittee hearing on the bill Thursday included representatives from the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, and Prison Fellowship, the Christian prison ministry founded by convicted Watergate fi gure Chuck Colson.

It is in the interest of every American, from every political and philosophical perspective, to address “a profound, deeply corrosive crisis that we have largely been ignoring at our peril,” Webb told his colleagues.

That crisis - particularly the nation’s drift toward mass incarceration - “is dramatically affecting millions of lives, draining billions of dollars from our economy, destroying notions of neighborhood and family in hundreds of communities across the country, and, most importantly, it is not making our country a safer or a fairer place,” he said.

The statistics are startling:

• The United States has 5 per-cent of the world’s population but 25 percent of its prison population: more than 2.3 million inmates and climbing.

• Half a million of those are drug offenders, many of them with no history of violence or high-level traffi cking.

• Racial disparities are stark. African Americans account for 14 percent of drug users and 74 percent of drug offenders sentenced to prison.

• Four times as many mentally ill people are in prisons as in mental hospitals.

At Thursday’s hearing, most agreed that the dramatic rise in the nation’s imprisoned population - a fivefold increase over the past three decades - has failed to achieve its objective.

“We call it a correctional system, but we all know it doesn’t correct,” said Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Pa., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on crime and drugs.

The most impassioned testimony came from someone with firsthand experience: Pat Nolan, vice president of Prison Fellowship, a former California state legislator who spent 29 months in federal prison after getting caught in an FBI sting for campaign fi nance violations.

“What I saw inside prison really troubled me,” Nolan said, describing widespread rape, disease and overcrowding. Most inmates are simply being warehoused, he said. There is little training or treatment, making it hard for them to fi nd a job when they get out and raising the chances that they will return to prison.

The cost to taxpayers is staggering, Nolan said: $68 billion and rising.

Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton said communities need to focus on preventing crime, not just responding to it. “There are too many people in prison who don’t need to be there,” he said, citing the mentally ill as an example.

The time is ripe for reform, said Charles Ogletree, a professor at Harvard Law School.

“You can be smart on crime and save a lot of money,” he said.

The commission Webb proposes would conduct an 18-month, top-to-bottom review of the criminal justice system and make recommendations for reform. Among its objectives would be to reduce the incarceration rate, establish re-entry programs for ex-offenders, reform the nation’s drug policies and improve treatment of the mentally ill.

The bill is the National Criminal Justice Commission Act of 2009, SB 714. It is unknown how soon the subcommittee will act on it.

Copyright: 2009 The Virginian-Pilot