COLUMN LEFT/RONALD KUBY/WM. KUNSTLER : Distinction Without a Difference : On political crimes, America should live up to the standards it demands of others.

When Nelson Mandela walked out of a South African prison earlier this year, U.S. officials rushed to praise the government of Frederik W. de Klerk for this gesture of national reconciliation. Yet the United States still refuses to discuss amnesty for Leonard Peltier, an American Indian whose questionable conviction for the killing of two FBI agents has become a cause celebre from Moscow to Soweto.

For the first time since its revolution, Cuba permitted independent U.S. observers to enter its jails and interview political prisoners. When the Cubans requested reciprocity, they were denied access to U.S. prisons.

After Nicaragua’s pre-election release of more than 1,000 Contra soldiers, an American observer quipped that the Sandinistas should have held out for democratic reform in the United States.

It is bitterly ironic that, as much of the world responds to U.S. pressure for humane treatment or amnesty for political prisoners, the United States stonily ignores its own. For the second straight year, U.S.-based human-rights groups have appeared before the Human Rights Commission of the United Nations in Geneva to charge that hundreds of people are now held in U.S. prisons “as a direct results of actions undertaken in furtherance of a political or social vision.” Some go back to the anti-war and black liberation struggles of almost a generation ago. Others are imprisoned for acts opposing U.S. policies in Puerto Rico, Central America and South Africa. Many, but far from all, have used violence against property, and a few toward the police.

The U.S. government claims it holds no political prisoners, only criminals. This is a distinction without a difference. All of the world’s political prisoners have been convicted of acts that the authorities pro tem deem criminal. Mandela plotted sabotage and the forcible overthrow of the apartheid regime. Bombing a South African installation is violent and illegal, whether done in Pretoria or New York, but this does not detract from its political character.

The U.S. policy of refusing to acknowledge its political prisoners is particularly indefensible given its discriminatory practices toward them. Persons who commit politically motivated offenses in furtherance of leftist causes receive substantially, often shockingly, harsher treatment than those who commit similar acts for venal or right-wing reasons.

Prosecutors in political cases regularly abuse their broad power to select charges by breaking down the criminal activity into its component parts, then charging each one as a separate offense. In the case of Yu Kikumura, an alleged member of the Japanese Red Army, the federal prosecutor in New Jersey charged possession of three pipe bombs as nine separate crimes. By contrast, in the same federal circuit at the same time, a man who conspired to illegally purchase 56 firearms was charged with only two offenses.

Such charging disparities translate into staggering sentencing disparities. Kikumura received 30 years. His apolitical counterpart faced a maximum of eight months. Susan Rosenberg and Timothy Blunk, two Communist revolutionaries, received 58 years for possession of explosives. Dennis J. Malvasi, who admitted bombing one abortion clinic and attempting to bomb another, received only seven years.

After sentencing, politicals endure far harsher conditions than “ordinary” criminals. The Bureau of Prisons expressly used political affiliation as a criterion for assigning inmates to the Lexington (Ky.) High Security Unit for Women, and conditioned release upon renunciation of political allegiance. Lexington, internationally condemned for its use of sensory deprivation techniques and sexual harassment, was closed but a larger duplicate has been opened in Florida.

Male political prisoners usually serve years of their sentences in solitary confinement at the Marion Federal Penitentiary in Illinois. They are denied contact visits with their families, locked in cells 22 3/4 hours per day and subject to strict censorship of mail and reading materials.

America’s political prisoners fought what they perceived, often correctly, to be genuine injustices. If the United States desires to attain a moral high ground, it can start by living up to the standards it claims to demand of other countries--fair and humane treatment of political prisoners and, ultimately, amnesty for those whose crimes were acts of deep moral conviction.