High Court Justice Supports Bar Plan to Ease Sentencing

WASHINGTON, June 23 - Justice Anthony M. Kennedy endorsed proposals by a special commission of the American Bar Association on Wednesday for a return to more discretion in criminal sentencing and for alternatives to long prison sentences for people convicted of less serious crimes.

" 'Tough on crime' should not be a substitute for thoughtful reflection or lead us into moral blindness," Justice Kennedy said in accepting a copy of the report at the bar association's office here.

Last August, addressing the association's annual meeting, Justice Kennedy criticized criminal sentences in the United States as too long and too rigid and urged the legal profession to pay more attention to sentencing issues.

Dennis W. Archer, the association's president, invited a panel of experts that he called the Justice Kennedy Commission to study the subject and make recommendations.

The proposals include repeal of mandatory minimum sentences, "guided discretion" for judges in imposing sentences, simplifying and recalibrating the federal sentencing guidelines and alternatives to incarceration for offenders who pose the least risk. The commission also urges greater use of executive clemency and pardons and more attention to restoring prisoners' legal rights and to their re-entry into society.

In discussing the proposals on Wednesday, Mr. Archer noted that the 2.1 million people behind bars in the United States accounted for one-quarter of the world's incarcerated population.

These recommendations must be approved by the association's house of delegates at its convention in August to become A.B.A. policy.

In his speech last summer, Justice Kennedy said mandatory minimum sentences were too often "unwise and unjust." He said that in the country's approach to crime and punishment "our resources are misspent, our punishments too severe, our sentences too long."

In accepting the report on Wednesday from Mr. Archer and Stephen A. Saltzburg, a law professor at George Washington University who headed the commission, Justice Kennedy said that all the proposals had merit but that it was up to the bar association, "the legal system and the American people as a whole to decide" how to proceed. Noting that his home state, California, spends $27,000 a year to keep an inmate in prison but only $5,000 a year for each student in some districts, he said, "This society had better ask itself how it allocates its resources."