Today’s New York Times lead editorial:

America’s criminal justice system needs repair. Prisons are overcrowded, sentencing policies are uneven and often unfair, ex-convicts are poorly integrated into society, and the growing problem of gang violence has not received the attention it deserves.

Whenever the New York Times announces an epiphany like this, I cringe.  Hasn’t anybody over there been paying attention?  Did this just happen?  It’s a newspaper, for crying out loud.  Wouldn’t you think they would be following the news all along, at least to some small degree? 

If they had, whoever penned the editorial would know that they’re nipping at the edges of the problem.  Is America’s criminal justice system broken?  You betcha.  But the problem doesn’t start after conviction, as per their first two examples, or is limited to inner city urban gangs.  Dear New York Times folks, there is a far broader, system problem.

How about them lying cops?  How about those innocent people being convicted.  You include stories about the DNA exonerations, and somebody over there has to extrapolate that there may be a few innocent people in prison for whom DNA doesn’t apply.  And then there are problem with our protectors and servers flexing their pectorals to make sure that people don’t get to see dying relatives. How many Texans fill the prisons for that?

But the point of the editorial isn’t to show how astute the New York Times is when it comes to being on top of the most cursory understanding of a complex and flagrant problem.  This is just a pleasant side issue.  The point of the editorial is the Times’ promotion of the SOLUTION to our broken system.

For these and other reasons, a bill introduced last week by Senator Jim Webb, Democrat of Virginia, should be given high priority on the Congressional calendar.

The bill, which has strong bipartisan support, would establish a national commission to review the system from top to bottom. It is long overdue, and should be up and running as soon as possible.

So the solution to our broken criminal justice system is to form a national commission, a solution that I like to call, “let’s put on a play” from my adoring childhood memories of Spanky and Alfalfa’s solution to every problem.  And maybe it will be as good as the last play Congress put on, the United States Sentencing Commission.  You remember them, the guys charged with eliminating unfairness and unevenness in our criminal justice system.  The guys who were going to make sure that our national policy of making sure that criminals went to prison, and went for the same good long time in the northeast as they did in the southwest.  This went along with Congress’ brainstorm to eliminate parole in favor of supervised release, since changing names is almost the same as fixing things.

So it appears that this national commission concept has some traction, if it’s receiving bipartisan support.  And why not, since all it does is create a committee.  Washington loves committees, as it creates places to put people into.  Once it’s created, some very important person can say that she’s on the committee.  No doubt it will be a blue ribbon committee to boot, consisting of very serious men and women above reproach. 

We will know that because they will all have credentials like Biglaw, bench and United States Attorney on the resumes.  We can trust them because they are solid citizens.  And they will all be promoted as people who know the legal system inside and out, as all former US Attorneys (and their minions) most assuredly do.  You want to know who is never asked to be on blue ribbon committees?  Guys like Bennett.  Pattis. Gideon.  Me. 

After all, we’re just trench lawyers, the guys who work in the well of the court with the brilliant systems devised by far more important people than us.  Why would you want someone who has tried a few hundred cases when you can have some Biglaw partner who has tried 3 cases, or some political appointee whose life has been spent doing everything possible to put as many people in prison as humanly possible, while every smidgen of the system is carefully designed to facilitate their goals

Of course, one of the problems is that trench lawyers don’t tend to be good committee members.  We take positions.  We hold beliefs.  We are not satisfied with crafting a camel to appease the various interest groups and political agendas that present themselves on a committee.  We tend to do the unthinkable, explain why their ideas are foolish and won’t work.  They love unworkable ideas, wrapped up in pretty bows.  In fairness, they don’t realize that their ideas won’t work, because they don’t actually have a clue what they’re doing.  But they are blue ribbon committee-type people, and that’s far more important than people who get their hands dirty doing the work they have only read about.

Assuming this solution moves forward, there are two things we can all rely upon.  First, nothing will be done for the next 4 years, since it will take that long for the committee to meet a few times, engage a study, hold hearings, ask lawprofs what they think, review and reject the study, arrive at the camel they will propose, and send it off to Congress for approval.  Only then will Congress reinvent their own wheel, as each congressman and senator will have to prove that he knew more about the problem than the committee all along, so he can prove that he’s worthy of re-election to his constituents.

Why am I so down on the idea?  Certainly, we have a broken system.  Certainly it needs repair.  So why not strive to do better, support the committee, work to improve,  Because we’ve been here before, and it’s never helped.  In fact, it’s invariably made things worse.  Which is why we need another committee.

Update:  Via  Balko Glenn Greenwald at Salon applauds Webb for doing something “courageous and principled.” 

There are few things rarer than a major politician doing something that is genuinely courageous and principled, but Jim Webb’s impassioned commitment to fundamental prison reform is exactly that.

What’s most notable about Webb’s decision to champion this cause is how honest his advocacy is.  He isn’t just attempting to chip away at the safe edges of America’s oppressive prison state.  His critique of what we’re doing is fundamental, not incremental.  And, most important of all, Webb is addressing head-on one of the principal causes of our insane imprisonment fixation:  our aberrational insistence on criminalizing and imprisoning non-violent drug offenders (when we’re not doing worse to them). 

So putting on a play constitutes courage?  I guess that’s what comes of extremely low expectations.