Attorney General Michael Mukasey has in most ways been a vast improvement over his predecessor, Alberto Gonzales. But at a time when an unprecedented one in 100 American adults is behind bars — including one in nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34 — he has so far been a big disappointment to those hoping for a change in the lock-’em-up-and-throw-away-the-key policies on nonviolent drug offenders.

Mukasey has resorted to counterfactual fear-mongering in calling for Congress to roll back the U.S. Sentencing Commission’s wise, unanimous decision last year to reduce retroactively the especially cruel and counterproductive prison terms provided by its sentencing guidelines for crack cocaine. The commission’s action has made 19,500 federal prisoners serving crack sentences — more than 80 percent of whom are black — eligible at some point to seek sentence reductions averaging just over two years.

The commission’s decision, which became fully effective on March 3 over Mukasey’s objection, was a step toward slowing the sixfold increase since 1970 in the number of people behind bars in the United States, from 330,000 to 2.3 million, more than in any other nation. The impact of this prison binge on hundreds of thousands of young black drug offenders with (in most cases) no record of violence has been especially harsh. The seven-member commission has also urged Congress to reform the savagely severe federal mandatory minimum sentencing laws for crack.

But Mukasey objected to the retro-active sentence reductions, asserting in a February 25 speech to the Fraternal Order of Police (and on other occasions) that these 19,500 crack offenders "are some of the most serious and violent offenders in the federal system."

"When the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life," President Bush said in his State of the Union address. In proposing a $300 million program to help the 600,000 inmates released from prison each year re-enter society, he called America "the land of the second chance."

Nobody could call Sen. Jeff Sessions soft on crime. The Alabama Republican is a passionate drug warrior. He won a Justice Department award in 1991, when he was the U.S. attorney in Mobile, for "significant achievement in the war against drug trafficking." Sessions says, "They could put that on my tombstone, and I’d be satisfied." He supports severe mandatory minimum sentences for truly dangerous drug dealers.

The uproar over ex-President Clinton’s abuse of his pardon power in some cases has overshadowed his salutary use of it in others-in particular, his commutations of the savagely severe prison terms of more than 20 nonviolent, nondangerous bit players in drug deals. These clemencies were long overdue palliatives to the cruel and irrational sentencing laws that sailed through a drug-crazed Congress in the 1980s. But Clinton freed only a fortunate few of the tens of thousands of nonviolent prisoners-mostly black and Hispanic-currently serving mandatory minimum prison terms of five, 10, and 20 years for relatively minor drug crimes. Thousands more will disappear into the gulag every year.

The good news is that crime is no longer the divisive issue it used to be in national politics, which is why Al Gore and George W. Bush haven’t been arguing about it. The bad news is the reason: Gore and most other Democrats have aped Republicans in demanding ever-longer prison terms, not only for the violent career criminals who should be behind bars, but also for small-time, nonviolent drug offenders and others who present no real threat to society.