"No Passion for Punishment"

We've often heard judges say, on panels and at conferences and before the U.S. Sentencing Commission and Congress, that the hardest part of their jobs is sentencing.  An excellent article from The Washington Post tells the story of Judge Ricardo Urbina, a federal judge for the District of Columbia who is retiring partly because that sentencing burden has been so heavy.

For Urbina, sentencing has always been filled with stress and doubt — of agonizingly weighing the crime against the defendant’s past, of worrying about what message to send to the public and of feeling that he was never given the proper tools to rehabilitate offenders. So, after 31 years on the local and D.C. federal bench, of sitting in judgment of scam artists, burglars, corrupt government officials and murderers, the judge retired last month, explaining that a prime reason he left a job he loved was that he had simply grown too fatigued of sentencing. ...

“I do not have a passion for punishment,” he said, a statement that helps explain why he is one of the more lenient sentencers on the D.C. federal bench, according to statistics. “If there is a way the court can contribute to the rehabilitation process, it is more likely the person will return to the mainstream.”

Prison surely rehabilitates some people, but there are other cost-effective tools out there that most federal judges simply never get the option to use, especially when a mandatory minimum sentence applies.  Last year in the federal system, 87% of all federal offenders got prison-only punishments.  In the Post's story, the woman Judge Urbina sentences gets a non-prison sentence.  Not everyone is so fortunate, and federal judges like Judge Urbina do not always have the flexibility to give punishments that make sense, cost less, and rehabilitate.