Pratt is one of the few judges who have tried to address the general public on the issue. His impassioned Sunday commentary in the Des Moines Register in January 1999 merely echoed in the wilderness.

Judge Sporkin could have warned Pratt. In 1993, in one of the many speeches he has given on drug sentencing, Sporkin made two points (aside from denouncing the "monstrous" nature of the sentencing rules): First, "the most vocal critics of the system have been judges," and second, "The criticism has largely fallen on deaf ears." Sporkin said this was a sad puzzle to him and his colleagues.

"We're very bad at making noise," Magnuson says. "You have to bear in mind that we're not political animals. Most of us were at one time, of course, but that was before we became judges. It's not our job to go out in the popular media and pound the table. It's our job to deal with the cases before us." Most of the complaints about the system that are on the public record appear in judicial opinions, such as Magnuson's in the Langmade case. "I think judges are being pretty candid in their opinions, but of course the world doesn't look at them," he says.

Bending the ear of a legislator has little more effect, according to Judge Brian Barnett Duff, a 1985 Reagan appointee to the U.S. District Court in Chicago. "They don't listen to you if you don't have a vote," says Duff, who served several years in the Illinois Legislature and as a state court judge.

Cabranes, who is politically adept enough to be at the top of everyone's list for the next Democratic Supreme Court nomination, sums it up in his book, writing that "Federal judges, for all their vaunted independence and high status, are poorly positioned and generally unable to influence national legislative policy."

Kafka, who would have admired the complexity of the hundreds of pages that comprise the Sentencing Guidelines Manual, once said, "One must be silent, if one can't give any help."

But Judge Duff is talking -- at least in his own court. He remembers the days when his authority forced him to "struggle with heart, brain and soul" to set the just sentence. He says some judges who arrived at the bench after the guidelines went into effect have never felt that struggle of ethics and conscience. Now, in the many cases where he feels the punishment greatly exceeds the crime, all he can do is flap his clipped wings and apologize to the defendant. "It's important for the man who is going to jail to know that there are people who know it was unfair and who care, and that the judge himself was in a spot."

Judge Nevas in Connecticut says he's proud of being a "tough sentencer" with no tolerance for illegal drug trafficking. But he also finds himself apologizing in his own court, telling defendants and their loved ones that he believes their sentences are too harsh. "You have to be careful," he says. "You don't want to overdo that, to be in a position to make everyone feel that the system is so bad that here you have the judge speaking against it. That would create a disrespect for the system, and undermine the legitimate efforts of law enforcement to curb the drug-dealing activity. There's a balance you have to strike."

Nevas says he doesn't say anything personally to the prosecutor in troubling cases, "because of course they are taking directions from more senior people in the U.S. attorney's office." But occasionally he tries to use a back channel to the prosecutor: "Sometimes I can work through the probation officer. I try to use downward departure, which gives us some limited possibilities. I'll suggest to the probation officer that I think the sentence is much too high, that I'd like to depart downward, even though I recognize that the basis for the departure is very thin in this particular case. But I ask why doesn't he go out and talk to the prosecutor and see whether, if I do depart downward, the prosecutor will get bent out of shape and take an appeal. It's all informal and behind the scenes."

Even Pratt, who's about as disgusted with the system as the judges get, leaves the prosecutors alone: "I don't give the prosecutors trouble. They know what a joke the drug war is. They also have a lot of ways of ignoring the law to get a result, though they wouldn't go on the record to say that. They've told me that privately ... The only people that don't know what's up are the policymakers in Washington. The prosecutors are forced to bring us one sad case after another. It's Kafkaesque. There's no actual person in the room or the building that I can think of as the enemy. It's an amorphous bureaucratic process that emanates from Congress."

Given the reticence of most judges, it's hard to know if the few I spoke with (having identified them as critics of drug sentencing) are a waning minority or the tip of a big iceberg of dissent. Sentencing Commmission chairwoman Murphy believes that the level of frustration among judges is "much less than when the guidelines were introduced." She and others see a distinct cleavage between "the more senior judges who have never reconciled themselves to the change" and judges who never experienced the old system. Nor are all the senior judges hostile to the guidelines, she says. "I myself am a convert," as are others among the older judges.

It's hard to say. None of several other judges I attempted to interview to get a contrasting viewpoint would respond.

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