Following observations from Alex Thurston and Lance Steagall yesterday that crime may soon rise again as a political issue, and that the recession is prompting much-needed prison reform, yesterday’s confirmation hearing for Sonia Sotomayor showed at least one encouraging sign that the issue is important to legislators.

On Tuesday, the first day of questioning, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) used his allotted 30 minutes for questioning to discuss criminal justice and prison reform, including, quite appropriately, sentencing disparities. None of the other Senators focused on this issue, though Durbin did in depth. Addressing Sotomayor, he stated (relevant transcript here):

Today, in the United States, 2.3 million people are in prison. We have the most prisoners of any country in the world as well as the highest per capita rate of prisoners in the world.

In America today, African-Americans are incarcerated at six times the rate of white Americans. Now, there’s one significant reason for this, and you have faced at least an aspect of it as a judge, and that is the crack powder disparity in sentencing. I will readily concede I voted for it as did many members of the House of Representatives frightened by the focus of this new, narcotic called crack that was so cheap and so destructive that we had to do something dramatic. We did.

We put a hundred to one ratio in terms of sentencing. Now, we realize we made a serious mistake. Eighty-one percent of those convicted for crack offenses in 2007 were African-American although only about 25 percent of crack cocaine users are African-Americans.

(The law he’s referring to is the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which created and strengthened federal powers to address drug abuse, drug trafficking, money laundering, and sentencing, among other things.)

Durbin went on to note that the Administration is seeking to change the  crack v. powder disparity, and he reported work on a "bipartisan" solution to address the issue (all before moving on to an actual question for Sotomayor). I’m not familiar with this legislation (assuming it exists), though legitimate bipartisanship may well be at work here. Senators as ideologically diverse as Joe Biden, Jeff Sessions and Orrin Hatch have all introduced bills seeking to reduce sentencing disparities. It would certainly be a good sign if a legislative fix to this particular aspect of criminal justice/prison reform were coming soon.