Interview With Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone Magazine - part 2 - President Bill Clinton - Interview

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Dec 11, 2000

Mr. Wenner. Well, they're filled with drug prisoners, these jails.

The President. ---most of them are related to drug or alcohol abuse, but there are some non-violent offenders unrelated to drug or alcohol abuse, which is not to say that I don't think white-collar criminals should ever go to jail. But I think we need to examine--the natural tendency of the American people, because most of us are law-abiding, is to think when somebody does something bad, we ought to put them in jail and throw the key away.

And what I think is, we need a discriminating view. There are some people who should be put in jail and throw the key away, because they can't help hurting other people. And I believe that one of the reasons for the declining crime rate is that we have a higher percentage of the people in jail who commit a lot of the crimes; a very small percentage of the people are multiple, habitual criminals. And if you could get a significant percentage of them in jail, the crime rate goes way down.

Now, on the other hand, there are a whole lot of other people in jail who will never commit another crime, particularly if they have-- if they get free of drugs or free of their alcohol abuse and if they get education and training and if somebody will give them a job and give them another chance.

And what I think we need is a serious reexamination of what we've done, because we've done a lot of good in identifying people who are habitual criminals and keeping them in prison longer, and that's one of the reasons that the crime rate has gone down, along with community policing and improving the economy. But we also have just captured a whole lot of people who are in jail, I think, longer than they need to be in prison and then get out without adequate drug treatment, job training, or job placement.

But the society is moving on this. I notice now back in Washington, there is a really good program where--maybe two, that I know--where they try to keep people who go to prison in touch with their children, and they use the Internet so they can E-mail back and forth. They try to, in other words, not cut people off so completely that they lose all hope and all incentive of returning to normal life, and they try not to damage these kids so badly, to reduce the chances that the kids will follow in their parents' footsteps.

Mr. Wenner. Let me change the subject.

The President. I think we need a whole new look at that. The sentencing guidelines, the disparities, are only a part of it. We have to look at how long should certain people go to prison from the point of view of what's good for society. We need to completely rethink it, because criminal laws and sentencing tend to be passed sort of seriatim in response to social problems at the moment.

Mr. Wenner. You, in general, restored judicial discretion and replace the kind of panic legislation that was passed about crack or-----

The President. The reasons for the sentencing guidelines in the first place was to try to reduce the arbitrary harshness. It wasn't because they wanted to make sure everybody went to jail for a while; it was because the citizen guidelines tended to be abusive on the other end of the spectrum.