Alan Vinegrad, former United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, writes in the New York Law Journal about the new Sentencing Reform Commission established by Gov. Spitzer.  Seizing the opportunity presented by a low crime rate coupled with the high costs of incarceration, New York is trying to find new ways to address the “lock-em-away-forever” theory that has proven to be a very costly failure.

The Commission on Sentencing Reform [in contrast to the USSC] does not appear to have been developed with any particular system in mind. Rather, it has been given the open-ended charge of recommending legislative fixes that include alternatives to incarceration and take into account the fiscal impact of the prison system. It appears that, beyond simple uniformity, the commission’s aim is to reduce prison populations while still maintaining public safety and the traditional goals of criminal punishment.

Wow.  Whenever the words “sentencing” and “commission” are used together, we immediately envision the dreaded grid used by the Feds to turn judges into grocery clerks, prosecutors into sentencing control freaks and disconnect humanity from the process.  While Booker and Fanfan were supposed to change all that, it has largely proven to be nothing more than a cruel hoax.