Righting sentences: let's get smart about who should - and shouldn't - be in jail.

• Author: Mencimer, Stephanie

Kenneth McDuff was called "the most extraordinarily violent criminal ever to set foot in Falls County, Texas," by the Falls County district attorney. He was also extraordinarily lucky. After being convicted of brutally murdering two teenage boys and then raping a girl and snapping her neck with a broomstick, he was scheduled to die in the electric chair. But in 1972, when the Supreme Court commuted all death penalty cases to life in prison, McDuff got off death row. And 15 years later, as the war on drugs poured offenders into Texas prisons, he got even luckier.

By 1987, the Texas penal system was so overcrowded that the state started paroling 750 prisoners a week--even though, after a few weeks, they didn't have 750 inmates left who were eligible for parole. So instead of closing the gates, the parole board lowered its standards. So what if every law enforcement officer who had ever encountered McDuff said he had no conscience and would probably kill again? In 1989 Lucky McDuff was sprung on the small Texas community of Rosebud. Three days after his release, the naked, strangled body Stephanie Mencimer is a Washington writer. of 29-year-old Sarafina Parker turned up in a weed patch nearby. After a year-long crime spree and a cameo on "America's Most Wanted," McDuff was finally apprehended once again and charged with three murders. Officials are still investigating six others for which he may be responsible.

In 1991, around the same time one of McDuff's alleged victims was found floating in a gravel pit in Dallas County, a seemingly unrelated event was unfolding in Washington. The Supreme Court was considering the case of Ronald A. Harmelin, a Michigan man with no criminal record, who'd been pulled over for running a red light and was caught with about a pound and a half of cocaine. Convicted, he was sentenced under Michigan's mandatory sentencing law to life in prison with no chance of parole. The same crime under federal law would have gotten Harmelin 10 years in prison; in Alabama, he would have gotten five. But the high court ruled that the life sentence was not a disproportionate punishment for the crime and let Harmelin's life sentence stand.

Kenneth McDuff and Ronald Harmelin have never met, but in the recent history of American corrections, their lives are tightly connected. As more Harmelins overcrowd our prisons, the McDuffs are being set free. One cause of this terrible tradeoff is, simply, a nearly unmanageable rise in crime in recent years. But another cause is the profoundly misplaced priorities that guide the U.S. criminal system.

The United States now incarcerates the largest percentage of its population of any country in the world--nearly a million people--and the public apparently just can't get enough. The Senate crime bill introduced in 1992 had 56 new criminal offenses or penalty increases for violent crimes, drug trafficking, terrorism, and firearm offenses, plus mandatory federal prison sentences for 12 other serious crimes. The longer and stiffer the sentences, the happier we Americans seem to be--at least, perhaps, until now.

California built nine new prisons in the eighties to relieve overcrowding and has plans to build another eight. Planners are already warning that the system will be just as crowded when construction is finished in 1996, with 163,100 inmates crammed into space designed for 74,700. The operation costs of the system are astronomical--$2.1 billion a year and rising, not including the $4 billion in scheduled building costs. Meanwhile, violent crime in the state is steadily increasing.

As politicians legislate tough sentences for every other felony-of-the-week, the California conundrum is quickly moving east. And the result is that, stiff sentences or no, we've begun to let...