Late last month, the House Judiciary Committee held hearings on the death of the Kathryn Johnston, the 92-year-old Atlanta woman killed by police during a November 2006 drug raid on her home.
Johnston died when she mistook a team of narcotics officers for criminal intruders. When the police broke down her door, she met them with an old pistol. They opened fire, and killed her.
A subsequent investigation revealed that the entire chain of events up to and shortly after Johnston's death were beset with lies, planted evidence, and cover-up on the part of the narcotics cops. They fabricated an imaginary informant to get the search warrant for Ms. Johnston's home. They planted evidence on a convicted felon, arrested him, then let him off in exchange for his tip—which he made up from whole cloth—that they'd find drugs in Ms. Johnston's house.
When they realized their mistake, they then tried to portray an innocent old woman as a drug dealer. They planted marijuana in Ms. Johnston's basement while she lay handcuffed and bleeding on the floor.
More investigation revealed that this kind of behavior wasn't aberrant, but common among narcotics officers in the Atlanta Police Department. Police Chief Richard Pennington eventually dismissed or reassigned the entire narcotics division of the APD.
What came out at the hearings investigating Kathryn Johnston's death was even more disturbing.
In one eye-popping exchange, two congressmen—one Democrat and one Republican—confronted Wayne Murphy, the assistant director of the FBI Directorate of Intelligence about the way the FBI uses drug informants. Rep. Dan Lundgren, R-Calif., and Rep. William Delahunt, D-Mass., told Murphy they were troubled by reports that the FBI had looked the other way while some of its drug informants participated in violent crimes, and that the agency then failed to notify local authorities, leaving many of those crimes unsolved.
Lundgren and Delahunt said they were also troubled by reports that in order to protect the identity of its informants, the FBI had withheld exculpatory evidence from criminal trials, resulting in innocent people going to prison.
This is worth repeating. The FBI has determined that in some cases, it's better to let innocent people be assaulted, murdered, or wrongly sent to prison than to halt a drug investigation involving one of its confidential informants.
Could Murphy assure the U.S. Congress, Delahunt and Lundgren asked, that the FBI has since instituted policies to ensure that kind of thing never happens again?
Murphy hemmed and hawed, but ultimately said that he could not make any such assurance. That in itself should have been huge news.
Shortly after the Johnston hearings concluded, another informant scandal emerged.
Jarrell Bray, a longtime informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration's Cleveland field office, admitted that with the cooperation of DEA agent Lee Lucas, he had repeatedly lied in court to secure the convictions of innocent people. Bray said he and Lucas fabricated evidence, falsely accused people who had done nothing wrong, then concocted bogus testimony to secure their convictions.
Bray's admission could result in dozens of overturned convictions.
There's nothing new about any of this. The problems with the use and abuse of drug informants have been known for years. Policymakers have just decided it's more important to keep up a brave front in the drug war than admit to the shortcomings. Bogus testimony from drug informants has led to wrongful arrest and/or incarceration of innocent people in Dallas, Texas; Hearne, Texas; St. Louis, Missouri; and Church Point, La.; to list just a handful of the more egregious examples.
In fact, more than 12 years ago, the National Law Journal ran a three-part series on the issue of drug informants. The magazine reviewed more than a thousand search warrants in four cities. It found widespread abuse with respect to the use of informants, and issued an urgent warning that "there is little or no oversight of the informant system," and that as a result, "the nation's system of justice is in danger."
Not much has changed.
The article was spurred by the case of Donald Carlson, a San Diego businessman who was nearly killed in 1992 after an informant's faulty tip led police to raid his home. Like Kathryn Johnston, Carlson thought the police were criminal intruders, and fired at them in defense of his home as they broke down his door. He was shot several times in the back, and spent six weeks in intensive care.
As in Atlanta, a subsequent investigation revealed severe deficiencies in the use of informants for drug crimes. The informant in Carlson's case was later convicted on 25 counts of lying to federal law enforcement officials.
In fact, Johnston and Carlson aren't the only ones. Bad informants have led to mistaken drug raids all over the country. Many of these raids have resulted in the deaths of innocent people, including Harlem's Alberta Spruill, Denver's Ismael Mena, Houston's Pedro Navarro, and Albuquerque's Ralph Garrison.
Dave Doddridge is a 20-year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department and a former narcotics officer. He's now a speaker for Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, a group of current and former cops who have come out against the drug war. Doddridge says what happened in Atlanta isn't at all uncommon, and shouldn't be mistaken for a few rogue police officers acting out of line.
"There's tremendous pressure to 'climb the ladder' after you make a drug bust," he says, referring to the practice of getting one drug offender to give up information on his suppliers and superiors. "You want to get up that ladder before word hits the street, and the guys you're after know that you're on to them. That leads to the temptation to take shortcuts," he says. "What happened in Atlanta goes on all over the country."
These sorts of police tactics would be morally dubious if they were being used to fight terrorism, or to ensure national security. But they grow more absurd—and more intolerable—when you consider the ultimate end, here. None of this deception, corruption, and abuse is being employed to catch sleeper Al-Qaeda cells, or to catch murderers or serial killers or pedophiles. It's being used to stop people from getting high.
Thursday, September 13, 2007
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Sarasota County Commission pledges jail will stay open:
They blinked.
The Sarasota County Commission indicated it would come up with about $1.2 million Monday night to keep the Venice holding facility open if it had to -- despite a plea to Sheriff William Balkwill to make further cuts in his budget for the jail.
Balkwill has threatened to shut the facility down, claiming he has no room in his budget to fund it.
"We do need the jail," said County Commissioner Paul Mercier, before a crowd predominantly from North Port dressed in red as a sign of solidarity. "If this is a standoff, I'll blink."
North Port City Commissioner Vanessa Carusone encouraged the county commissioners to take money from her city's contributions to the county to cover the costs required to keep the jail open.
"Even with the reduction in your millage rate and the reduction in our millage rate, there's still an additional $660,000 that will be added to your coffers from the city of North Port," Carusone said. "I implore you to take that money and put it toward the sheriff's department budget. Because if there is anything that is needed that cannot be cut, it's the life, safety and well-being of our South County residents."
That's when County Commissioner Shannon Staub fell in with Mercier, despite her earlier input on a motion that would encourage County Administrator Jim Ley to work with Balkwill to find more money in his budget -- as well as other sources -- for the facility.
"I can only speak for myself," Staub said. "I'm blinking. I'm ready. Let's get it done. Get it over. And I'm very sorry that we even had to come to this point."
Not budging
Things didn't start out in such a conciliatory manner. Before the meeting, County Commissioner Joe Barbetta was adamant about two things: The jail must stay open and the sheriff must help.
"We're going to have to figure out a way to keep it open and hopefully we'll get some cooperation from the sheriff to help us do that," Barbetta said. "I can't conceive us not doing everything we possibly can to keep it open."
Barbetta said he learned Venice was willing to withdraw its condition for the sheriff's office to pay rent for the facility, which he saw as a good first step toward coming to a solution.
"So it really comes down to the sheriff's manpower," Barbetta said, hinting Balkwill might make cuts in shifts, hours or jobs.
But when Balkwill came forward to state his case, it was plain to see he wasn't going to budge.
"We're down about 27 positions right now," Balkwill said. "The only way we can (keep the jail open) right now is through overtime."
Balkwill said there are other services his department provides to the county that add costs to his budget. These include working with the fire department, the Sarasota Police Department, animal services, roads and bridges and other internal services for the county.
"We've also cut over 100 vehicles from this year's budget," Balkwill said. "As far as staff goes, I challenge you to compare our staff levels with any other agency surrounding us right now."
Afterward, although he promised he was "always willing to work with them," Balkwill said his budget was too maxed out to subsidize the jail.
"What I heard in there was (the county) was funding this," he said.
By Steven J. Smith Sun-Herald
The Sarasota County Commission indicated it would come up with about $1.2 million Monday night to keep the Venice holding facility open if it had to -- despite a plea to Sheriff William Balkwill to make further cuts in his budget for the jail.
Balkwill has threatened to shut the facility down, claiming he has no room in his budget to fund it.
"We do need the jail," said County Commissioner Paul Mercier, before a crowd predominantly from North Port dressed in red as a sign of solidarity. "If this is a standoff, I'll blink."
North Port City Commissioner Vanessa Carusone encouraged the county commissioners to take money from her city's contributions to the county to cover the costs required to keep the jail open.
"Even with the reduction in your millage rate and the reduction in our millage rate, there's still an additional $660,000 that will be added to your coffers from the city of North Port," Carusone said. "I implore you to take that money and put it toward the sheriff's department budget. Because if there is anything that is needed that cannot be cut, it's the life, safety and well-being of our South County residents."
That's when County Commissioner Shannon Staub fell in with Mercier, despite her earlier input on a motion that would encourage County Administrator Jim Ley to work with Balkwill to find more money in his budget -- as well as other sources -- for the facility.
"I can only speak for myself," Staub said. "I'm blinking. I'm ready. Let's get it done. Get it over. And I'm very sorry that we even had to come to this point."
Not budging
Things didn't start out in such a conciliatory manner. Before the meeting, County Commissioner Joe Barbetta was adamant about two things: The jail must stay open and the sheriff must help.
"We're going to have to figure out a way to keep it open and hopefully we'll get some cooperation from the sheriff to help us do that," Barbetta said. "I can't conceive us not doing everything we possibly can to keep it open."
Barbetta said he learned Venice was willing to withdraw its condition for the sheriff's office to pay rent for the facility, which he saw as a good first step toward coming to a solution.
"So it really comes down to the sheriff's manpower," Barbetta said, hinting Balkwill might make cuts in shifts, hours or jobs.
But when Balkwill came forward to state his case, it was plain to see he wasn't going to budge.
"We're down about 27 positions right now," Balkwill said. "The only way we can (keep the jail open) right now is through overtime."
Balkwill said there are other services his department provides to the county that add costs to his budget. These include working with the fire department, the Sarasota Police Department, animal services, roads and bridges and other internal services for the county.
"We've also cut over 100 vehicles from this year's budget," Balkwill said. "As far as staff goes, I challenge you to compare our staff levels with any other agency surrounding us right now."
Afterward, although he promised he was "always willing to work with them," Balkwill said his budget was too maxed out to subsidize the jail.
"What I heard in there was (the county) was funding this," he said.
By Steven J. Smith Sun-Herald
Friday, August 31, 2007
Treat addicted criminals, keep streets safer:
It's no secret that Florida's economy has taken it on the chin with regard to the distressed housing market. The downturn in such a key economic sector of our state has now compelled Gov. Charlie Crist to ask Florida lawmakers to return once again to Tallahassee to reduce the state's spending plan. But legislators will be faced with trimming a budget already pruned pretty tightly. It's not just fat that will be hitting the butcher's floor this time around. Budget reductions will affect programs and policies of great significance in the sunshine state.
Legislators must wield their authority to reduce expenses wisely. Elimination or reduction of seemingly nonessential programs has often produced grave unintended consequences -- the result has been penny-wise, pound-foolish spending plans that just defer greater expenses until some later date.
Drug-addiction treatment services provided by Florida's state agencies have always been vulnerable to cuts in times like these. Under normal circumstances, the common sense and humanity of these programs isn't questioned. But when times are bad, there is a limited constituency to speak on behalf of some Florida's most vulnerable people.
Drug addiction is a problem that, when left untreated, exacts a social, medical, legal and economic toll on our state so enormous it's difficult to calculate. But effective addiction treatment has been proven over and over to improve the quality of life in our state, reduce expenses related to substance abuse and protect the safety of the public.
A shining example of how these programs serve Florida are those employed by the Florida Department of Corrections. Secretary James McDonough is a gifted thinker -- not someone who develops policy on a whim or without regard for the weighty obligations of his post. His department embraces a policy of providing evidence-based addiction treatment for inmates and offenders on probation.
This may seem a surprisingly humane luxury for the guy who was the principal author of the U.S. Army's central fighting doctrine. But just ask the MIT graduate why he makes this a priority, and you will likely get a clear answer: Treating addicted criminals keeps the streets safer. McDonough's department has compiled reliable data in support of his policy: Three studies have demonstrated clearly that drug treatment for Florida offenders on probation in the community reduces recidivism by 27-30 percent. Treatment of addicted prisoners demonstrated reductions of 11-15 percent in recidivism.
His policy is also supported by a national meta-analysis of more than 290 offender programs intended to reduce crime. This rigorous analyis found that addiction treatment consistently proved its value in reducing recidivism among criminal offenders -- more than supervision and surveillance, more than electronic monitoring, more than faith-based interventions and more than prison time. Addiction treatment topped all of these programs for reducing crime among convicted criminals.
Effective addiction treatment of criminal offenders is a fiscally responsible public safety measure that must be protected and developed as a cornerstone of public safety policy. As a matter of public safety and fiscal responsibility, Florida legislators and Crist should protect these important programs as they weigh decisions on budget reductions.
By Finn Kavanagh, vice president of Phoenix House, chairs the Florida Alcohol and Drug Abuse Association's Criminal Justice Committee.
Legislators must wield their authority to reduce expenses wisely. Elimination or reduction of seemingly nonessential programs has often produced grave unintended consequences -- the result has been penny-wise, pound-foolish spending plans that just defer greater expenses until some later date.
Drug-addiction treatment services provided by Florida's state agencies have always been vulnerable to cuts in times like these. Under normal circumstances, the common sense and humanity of these programs isn't questioned. But when times are bad, there is a limited constituency to speak on behalf of some Florida's most vulnerable people.
Drug addiction is a problem that, when left untreated, exacts a social, medical, legal and economic toll on our state so enormous it's difficult to calculate. But effective addiction treatment has been proven over and over to improve the quality of life in our state, reduce expenses related to substance abuse and protect the safety of the public.
A shining example of how these programs serve Florida are those employed by the Florida Department of Corrections. Secretary James McDonough is a gifted thinker -- not someone who develops policy on a whim or without regard for the weighty obligations of his post. His department embraces a policy of providing evidence-based addiction treatment for inmates and offenders on probation.
This may seem a surprisingly humane luxury for the guy who was the principal author of the U.S. Army's central fighting doctrine. But just ask the MIT graduate why he makes this a priority, and you will likely get a clear answer: Treating addicted criminals keeps the streets safer. McDonough's department has compiled reliable data in support of his policy: Three studies have demonstrated clearly that drug treatment for Florida offenders on probation in the community reduces recidivism by 27-30 percent. Treatment of addicted prisoners demonstrated reductions of 11-15 percent in recidivism.
His policy is also supported by a national meta-analysis of more than 290 offender programs intended to reduce crime. This rigorous analyis found that addiction treatment consistently proved its value in reducing recidivism among criminal offenders -- more than supervision and surveillance, more than electronic monitoring, more than faith-based interventions and more than prison time. Addiction treatment topped all of these programs for reducing crime among convicted criminals.
Effective addiction treatment of criminal offenders is a fiscally responsible public safety measure that must be protected and developed as a cornerstone of public safety policy. As a matter of public safety and fiscal responsibility, Florida legislators and Crist should protect these important programs as they weigh decisions on budget reductions.
By Finn Kavanagh, vice president of Phoenix House, chairs the Florida Alcohol and Drug Abuse Association's Criminal Justice Committee.
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Cut hard time: Rehabilitation does more than cut costs.
James McDonough is one of the longest serving top state officials in Florida, having been the so-called Drug Czar for most of the Jeb Bush administration and now serving as secretary of the Department of Corrections under Gov. Crist.
He is also a man who has the wisdom and the gumption to try to lead the leaders, coming up with proposals such as this week's suggestion that his agency can save 10 percent by moving thousands of state inmates from prisons to work release, substance abuse and education programs.
The savings he projects would be twice what Mr. Crist has asked of the agency, but it isn't an easy proposal to swallow politically, however wise and far-sighted if managed with scrupulous regard for public safety.
Mr. McDonough wants to use the approach, releasing non-sex offenders - with no escape history or domestic violence injunctions - three months early, to better prepare inmates to make a successful transition back into society. Right now about a third of inmates released from DOC, return, so the current system isn't exactly working when it comes to recidivism.
In a report Saturday in the Sarasota Herald Tribune, Mr. McDonough said he realized this would be a shift from more than a decade of hard-line policies - including those emanating from the governor's own "chain-gang Charlie" years. In the 1990s, then-state senator Crist lead lawmakers in mandating that all inmates serve 85 percent of their sentence, and promoted work on roadside labor crews.
But the governor said last week that he respects Mr. McDonough's "excellent judgment" and would like to see what offenders would be under consideration, and whether they would indeed pose little threat to the public.
This is an open-minded view not reflected in the Senate where criminal justice committee chairman Victor Crist (no relation to the governor) reacted more negatively.
It is indeed a concept to be considered very carefully, but clearly the need to make dire cuts in the budget is an incentive and opportunity to review any programs that may represent excessive loyalty to a political selling point, but cannot necessarily be supported.
For example, some 3,000 inmates who, nearing the end of their sentences, have already been out working in the public for sometime yet are staying in DOC institutions at night. Mr. McDonough, a former West Point-educated Army officer, said there is little risk in releasing these inmates to work-release centers, which still provide oversight, drug testing, garnished wages and so forth.
Another 3,600 inmates are coming from local communities that have sentenced them to a year and a day - just long enough to place them in a state prison instead of in an overcrowded local jail. Mr. McDonough contends many of these would be more effectively managed in halfway houses or substance abuse treatment centers instead of expensive state prisons, an approach that would promote a better transition for these short-sentence inmates back into society.
Given the state budget crunch, and the fact that the budget population has doubled since 1990 in large part due to laws that put long-term incarceration above vocational, education and mental health treatment - a review of programs that aren't truly effective but are excessively expensive is a prudent, probably necessary, and even professionally smart step to take.
An Editorial from the Tallahassee Democrat
He is also a man who has the wisdom and the gumption to try to lead the leaders, coming up with proposals such as this week's suggestion that his agency can save 10 percent by moving thousands of state inmates from prisons to work release, substance abuse and education programs.
The savings he projects would be twice what Mr. Crist has asked of the agency, but it isn't an easy proposal to swallow politically, however wise and far-sighted if managed with scrupulous regard for public safety.
Mr. McDonough wants to use the approach, releasing non-sex offenders - with no escape history or domestic violence injunctions - three months early, to better prepare inmates to make a successful transition back into society. Right now about a third of inmates released from DOC, return, so the current system isn't exactly working when it comes to recidivism.
In a report Saturday in the Sarasota Herald Tribune, Mr. McDonough said he realized this would be a shift from more than a decade of hard-line policies - including those emanating from the governor's own "chain-gang Charlie" years. In the 1990s, then-state senator Crist lead lawmakers in mandating that all inmates serve 85 percent of their sentence, and promoted work on roadside labor crews.
But the governor said last week that he respects Mr. McDonough's "excellent judgment" and would like to see what offenders would be under consideration, and whether they would indeed pose little threat to the public.
This is an open-minded view not reflected in the Senate where criminal justice committee chairman Victor Crist (no relation to the governor) reacted more negatively.
It is indeed a concept to be considered very carefully, but clearly the need to make dire cuts in the budget is an incentive and opportunity to review any programs that may represent excessive loyalty to a political selling point, but cannot necessarily be supported.
For example, some 3,000 inmates who, nearing the end of their sentences, have already been out working in the public for sometime yet are staying in DOC institutions at night. Mr. McDonough, a former West Point-educated Army officer, said there is little risk in releasing these inmates to work-release centers, which still provide oversight, drug testing, garnished wages and so forth.
Another 3,600 inmates are coming from local communities that have sentenced them to a year and a day - just long enough to place them in a state prison instead of in an overcrowded local jail. Mr. McDonough contends many of these would be more effectively managed in halfway houses or substance abuse treatment centers instead of expensive state prisons, an approach that would promote a better transition for these short-sentence inmates back into society.
Given the state budget crunch, and the fact that the budget population has doubled since 1990 in large part due to laws that put long-term incarceration above vocational, education and mental health treatment - a review of programs that aren't truly effective but are excessively expensive is a prudent, probably necessary, and even professionally smart step to take.
An Editorial from the Tallahassee Democrat
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Jail alternatives:
At the Charlotte County Jail, many inmates sleep on "boats," or plastic beds on the ground. That's because there are 612 inmates crammed into a facility designed for 528.
The conditions are just as crowded at the DeSoto County Jail, which has 160 inmates for 148 beds, and the Sarasota County Jail, which has an operating capacity of 872 but last month housed 1,084 inmates.
"Unfortunately, you violate your own rules," said DeSoto County Sheriff Vernon L. Keen. "We set rules that are based on the safety and welfare and so forth of the staff and the inmates, and then we violate it because we don't have anything else to do with them."
On Aug. 8, the Sun held a roundtable discussion with nine people who deal with jail overcrowding at the law enforcement, jail administration, court and government levels. They spoke about why some inmates spend so long in jail and what can be done to alleviate overcrowding -- including utilizing alternative methods of sentencing.
The time it takes to get to trial plays a role in jail overcrowding. Nearly half of the people at the Charlotte, DeSoto and Sarasota jails are awaiting felony trials. It can take years for those cases to reach a resolution.
That delay is related to the increasing number of felony cases entering the judicial system. In 2005, 1,750 cases entered the system, then 1,910 in 2006, according to Assistant State Attorney Daniel P. Feinberg, who works in Charlotte County. So far this year, there are 1,369 felony cases. Two judges handle felony cases in Charlotte County.
Minor offenses
Many others are in jail for relatively minor offenses -- driving with a suspended or revoked license, or violation of probation.
"A lot of our citizens want everybody arrested," said Charlotte County Sheriff John Davenport. "It's the citizens themselves who need to be educated."
Defense attorney Paul D. Sullivan agreed. "I think our problem is, we want to lock up too many of our citizens," he said. "People get arrested for stuff they never used to get arrested for."
Sullivan pointed out that driver's licenses are often revoked as a penalty for crimes unrelated to driving, such as drug charges. However, people often need to drive to get to work, and consequently end up back in jail. Probation is another issue that plays into jail overcrowding -- probation officers do not always have much discretion over whether to arrest a person on even a minor violation, and those arrested on violation of probation charges typically are booked into jail without bond.
At the Charlotte County Jail, those arrested on violation of probation charges -- both misdemeanor and felony -- make up about 14 percent of the inmate population.
Keen said the way people committing driving offenses and probation violations are dealt with is a reflection of the public's expectations. As an example, he pointed out that there could be considerable public outcry if a person driving on a suspended or revoked license got into a crash and killed someone.
"Maybe they put too much emphasis on 'he didn't have a license,'" Keen said. "They eat us up when something happens. There's not a problem until there's a problem."
Though arrests for probation violation may contribute to jail overcrowding, the program itself is one of the most frequently-used alternatives to incarceration. Rather than serve a sentence entirely behind bars, many defendants are placed on probation, which requires them to keep in contact with a probation officer and follow a set of guidelines that may include a curfew or random drug testing, among other conditions.
Jon Embury, court services manager in Charlotte County, said many defendants have come to expect probation.
"It's not looked at as an alternative anymore," he said.
What's more, the penalty for violating the terms of probation is going to jail or prison to serve out a sentence.
"Probation is only effective if there's a threat of incarceration," said Judge Paul Alessandroni.
Other alternatives
Another alternative to incarceration is electronic monitoring, which costs about $16 per day. However, Embury pointed out that a determined criminal could cut off the monitoring device.
"There's not going to be one magic bullet," Embury said.
Diversion programs exist for some first-time defendants and those with drug and mental health problems. Charlotte County's drug court accepts 15 people at a time and focuses on getting treatment for people with addictions.
"For the most part, people who deserve to be in these programs get in these programs," Feinberg said. "We can give them some opportunities they wouldn't otherwise have."
However, it can be difficult to coordinate limited resources to operate such programs.
"If I've got to do a drug court program, I've got to staff an attorney -- I've got to pull one of 15 attorneys that handle all of our cases, and that attorney's got to spend ... a minimum of three hours per week to spend on a population of 15," Feinberg said, "When we're having a 21 percent increase in felony crimes."
Another problem with those programs is the limited pool of qualified applicants, Feinberg said. Many are designed for first-time, nonviolent offenders, and defendants' prior records may render them ineligible.
"Your average is probably around nine or 10 (prior) offenses," Feinberg said. "I don't know what else to do with them ... I can't divert them."
Those waiting for their cases to be resolved are sometimes released from jail on their own recognizance -- a practice Sullivan felt should be more widely used with those accused of minor infractions, rather than pretrial release, which involves more supervision.
Those who work in pretrial supervision are "doing a great service, they're there every morning, but they ought to be supervising somebody else because the people who wind up in pretrial release services should be ROR," Sullivan said.
At the roundtable, all nine participants agreed that there was no simple solution to the problem of jail overcrowding.
"Obviously, it's not something we can solve overnight, or we would've done it," Keen said.
SOME ALTERNATIVE PROGRAMS
DeSoto County
* Probation
* Community control
* Pretrial intervention -- for first-time, nonviolent offenders. Those who go through a particular program can have their cases not prosecuted.
Charlotte County
* Probation
* Worthless check, domestic violence, pretrial and misdemeanor diversion programs
* Drug court
* Mental health court
* Supervised or pretrial release
* Teen court
Sarasota County
* Probation
* Drug court
* Mental health court
* Pretrial services
* CART (Community Alternative Residential Treatment) Initiative -- a three-phase program for individuals with mental health and addiction issues.
By CAROLYN QUINN
The conditions are just as crowded at the DeSoto County Jail, which has 160 inmates for 148 beds, and the Sarasota County Jail, which has an operating capacity of 872 but last month housed 1,084 inmates.
"Unfortunately, you violate your own rules," said DeSoto County Sheriff Vernon L. Keen. "We set rules that are based on the safety and welfare and so forth of the staff and the inmates, and then we violate it because we don't have anything else to do with them."
On Aug. 8, the Sun held a roundtable discussion with nine people who deal with jail overcrowding at the law enforcement, jail administration, court and government levels. They spoke about why some inmates spend so long in jail and what can be done to alleviate overcrowding -- including utilizing alternative methods of sentencing.
The time it takes to get to trial plays a role in jail overcrowding. Nearly half of the people at the Charlotte, DeSoto and Sarasota jails are awaiting felony trials. It can take years for those cases to reach a resolution.
That delay is related to the increasing number of felony cases entering the judicial system. In 2005, 1,750 cases entered the system, then 1,910 in 2006, according to Assistant State Attorney Daniel P. Feinberg, who works in Charlotte County. So far this year, there are 1,369 felony cases. Two judges handle felony cases in Charlotte County.
Minor offenses
Many others are in jail for relatively minor offenses -- driving with a suspended or revoked license, or violation of probation.
"A lot of our citizens want everybody arrested," said Charlotte County Sheriff John Davenport. "It's the citizens themselves who need to be educated."
Defense attorney Paul D. Sullivan agreed. "I think our problem is, we want to lock up too many of our citizens," he said. "People get arrested for stuff they never used to get arrested for."
Sullivan pointed out that driver's licenses are often revoked as a penalty for crimes unrelated to driving, such as drug charges. However, people often need to drive to get to work, and consequently end up back in jail. Probation is another issue that plays into jail overcrowding -- probation officers do not always have much discretion over whether to arrest a person on even a minor violation, and those arrested on violation of probation charges typically are booked into jail without bond.
At the Charlotte County Jail, those arrested on violation of probation charges -- both misdemeanor and felony -- make up about 14 percent of the inmate population.
Keen said the way people committing driving offenses and probation violations are dealt with is a reflection of the public's expectations. As an example, he pointed out that there could be considerable public outcry if a person driving on a suspended or revoked license got into a crash and killed someone.
"Maybe they put too much emphasis on 'he didn't have a license,'" Keen said. "They eat us up when something happens. There's not a problem until there's a problem."
Though arrests for probation violation may contribute to jail overcrowding, the program itself is one of the most frequently-used alternatives to incarceration. Rather than serve a sentence entirely behind bars, many defendants are placed on probation, which requires them to keep in contact with a probation officer and follow a set of guidelines that may include a curfew or random drug testing, among other conditions.
Jon Embury, court services manager in Charlotte County, said many defendants have come to expect probation.
"It's not looked at as an alternative anymore," he said.
What's more, the penalty for violating the terms of probation is going to jail or prison to serve out a sentence.
"Probation is only effective if there's a threat of incarceration," said Judge Paul Alessandroni.
Other alternatives
Another alternative to incarceration is electronic monitoring, which costs about $16 per day. However, Embury pointed out that a determined criminal could cut off the monitoring device.
"There's not going to be one magic bullet," Embury said.
Diversion programs exist for some first-time defendants and those with drug and mental health problems. Charlotte County's drug court accepts 15 people at a time and focuses on getting treatment for people with addictions.
"For the most part, people who deserve to be in these programs get in these programs," Feinberg said. "We can give them some opportunities they wouldn't otherwise have."
However, it can be difficult to coordinate limited resources to operate such programs.
"If I've got to do a drug court program, I've got to staff an attorney -- I've got to pull one of 15 attorneys that handle all of our cases, and that attorney's got to spend ... a minimum of three hours per week to spend on a population of 15," Feinberg said, "When we're having a 21 percent increase in felony crimes."
Another problem with those programs is the limited pool of qualified applicants, Feinberg said. Many are designed for first-time, nonviolent offenders, and defendants' prior records may render them ineligible.
"Your average is probably around nine or 10 (prior) offenses," Feinberg said. "I don't know what else to do with them ... I can't divert them."
Those waiting for their cases to be resolved are sometimes released from jail on their own recognizance -- a practice Sullivan felt should be more widely used with those accused of minor infractions, rather than pretrial release, which involves more supervision.
Those who work in pretrial supervision are "doing a great service, they're there every morning, but they ought to be supervising somebody else because the people who wind up in pretrial release services should be ROR," Sullivan said.
At the roundtable, all nine participants agreed that there was no simple solution to the problem of jail overcrowding.
"Obviously, it's not something we can solve overnight, or we would've done it," Keen said.
SOME ALTERNATIVE PROGRAMS
DeSoto County
* Probation
* Community control
* Pretrial intervention -- for first-time, nonviolent offenders. Those who go through a particular program can have their cases not prosecuted.
Charlotte County
* Probation
* Worthless check, domestic violence, pretrial and misdemeanor diversion programs
* Drug court
* Mental health court
* Supervised or pretrial release
* Teen court
Sarasota County
* Probation
* Drug court
* Mental health court
* Pretrial services
* CART (Community Alternative Residential Treatment) Initiative -- a three-phase program for individuals with mental health and addiction issues.
By CAROLYN QUINN
Saturday, August 25, 2007
Reefer madness
A few weeks ago, 200 federal, state and local law-enforcement officers launched a huge marijuana-eradication effort in the mountains of Sacramento’s forested neighbor to the north, Shasta County. The strike, dubbed Operation Alesia, was so big that even President Bush’s drug czar, John Walters, flew out to Redding on July 12 to kick it off.
“America’s public lands are under attack,” Walters said, charging that heavily armed Mexican drug cartels had turned the national forests into “ground zero for drug cultivation. These violent drug traffickers are endangering America’s outdoor enthusiasts and sportsmen, and the sensitive ecosystems of our wilderness.”
The week-long operation was a big success, if success is measured by the number of plants seized, 283,397 in this case. Numerous other eradication raids—including ones in Calaveras County near Stockton, and in the Sequoia National Forest and Yosemite—have been executed across California these last weeks because cannabis plants mature in late July, early August.
Will all that expenditure of manpower and resources do much good in the long term? Probably not. Marijuana gardens are low-investment, high-yield ventures. If they don’t produce a crop, little is lost, at least as far as the cartel bosses are concerned. If some low-paid workers end up spending 10 years in prison, as could happen to the 16 Mexican nationals arrested during Operation Alesia, the cartels don’t care. They’ll just try again next year.
Not long ago, most marijuana growers in California were local people who cultivated the herb on their own land. Gradually, law enforcement drove most of them out of business, but demand for the product didn’t go away nor did the lure of high profits. Well-financed Mexican operators moved in to fill the void.
All the pot seizures in the world aren’t going to stop them. According to an October 2006 press release issued by former state Attorney General Bill Lockyer, the number of seizures increased by more than 1,200 percent in the past decade and yet marijuana remains California’s No. 1 cash crop, worth almost $14 billion annually.
For more than 30 years government has been trying to convince people not to use marijuana and spent billions of dollars trying to catch pot growers, and yet marijuana is still big business. It’s crazy to keep doing something that doesn’t work, especially when it’s so expensive. It’s time for a new approach, one that acknowledges reality.
We believe marijuana should be legalized and regulated. That’s what we do with wine, for example, and it seems to work. What’s more, a 2005 Harvard University study, signed by 500 economists, found that allowing marijuana to be taxed and regulated would actually lead to savings and revenue of $10-14 billion.
As Bruce Mirken, of the Marijuana Policy Project, notes, “There’s a reason you never hear about clandestine vineyards hidden in national parks and forests. If we regulated marijuana as we do wine, the problem Walters denounces so vehemently would disappear overnight.”
Editorial Sacramento News and Review 8/23/07
“America’s public lands are under attack,” Walters said, charging that heavily armed Mexican drug cartels had turned the national forests into “ground zero for drug cultivation. These violent drug traffickers are endangering America’s outdoor enthusiasts and sportsmen, and the sensitive ecosystems of our wilderness.”
The week-long operation was a big success, if success is measured by the number of plants seized, 283,397 in this case. Numerous other eradication raids—including ones in Calaveras County near Stockton, and in the Sequoia National Forest and Yosemite—have been executed across California these last weeks because cannabis plants mature in late July, early August.
Will all that expenditure of manpower and resources do much good in the long term? Probably not. Marijuana gardens are low-investment, high-yield ventures. If they don’t produce a crop, little is lost, at least as far as the cartel bosses are concerned. If some low-paid workers end up spending 10 years in prison, as could happen to the 16 Mexican nationals arrested during Operation Alesia, the cartels don’t care. They’ll just try again next year.
Not long ago, most marijuana growers in California were local people who cultivated the herb on their own land. Gradually, law enforcement drove most of them out of business, but demand for the product didn’t go away nor did the lure of high profits. Well-financed Mexican operators moved in to fill the void.
All the pot seizures in the world aren’t going to stop them. According to an October 2006 press release issued by former state Attorney General Bill Lockyer, the number of seizures increased by more than 1,200 percent in the past decade and yet marijuana remains California’s No. 1 cash crop, worth almost $14 billion annually.
For more than 30 years government has been trying to convince people not to use marijuana and spent billions of dollars trying to catch pot growers, and yet marijuana is still big business. It’s crazy to keep doing something that doesn’t work, especially when it’s so expensive. It’s time for a new approach, one that acknowledges reality.
We believe marijuana should be legalized and regulated. That’s what we do with wine, for example, and it seems to work. What’s more, a 2005 Harvard University study, signed by 500 economists, found that allowing marijuana to be taxed and regulated would actually lead to savings and revenue of $10-14 billion.
As Bruce Mirken, of the Marijuana Policy Project, notes, “There’s a reason you never hear about clandestine vineyards hidden in national parks and forests. If we regulated marijuana as we do wine, the problem Walters denounces so vehemently would disappear overnight.”
Editorial Sacramento News and Review 8/23/07
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Our nation's brutal approach to punishment:
The persistence of the death penalty is only one way in which the United States stands out from the rest of the Western world on crime and punishment.
It also has the highest incarceration rate of any country, with more than two million people behind bars. (China, second in the rankings, has an estimated 1.5 million, and Russia just short of 900,000.) The US has just 5 per cent of the world's population, but 25 per cent of its overall prison population.
Some of the reasons behind the extraordinary machinery of incarceration - including the death penalty - is cultural and historical. In the South, in particular, the phenomenon is inextricably linked to the long history of racial inequality, with blacks put away in numbers vastly disproportionate to their overall population.
The states with the highest ratio of prisoners per population are all former slave states with long traditions of jailhouse brutality, chain gangs and other barbaric practices: Louisiana (816 prisoners per 100,000 people), Texas (694) and Mississippi (669). In many states, blacks are up to 15 times as likely as whites to find themselves behind bars. In Florida, one in three adult black men has a criminal record.
Some trends, though, are more recent - tied, in particular, to the mania for tough-on-crime legislation that has swept state after state in the past 25 years.
The national prison population has quadrupled since 1980, the increase fuelled in particular by the "war on drugs" and the consequent incarceration of hundreds of thousands of petty drug offenders. That, in turn, has exacerbated a host of problems from overcrowding to prison rape to the formation of ultra-violent prison gangs, many of them based on deep racial hatred.
In many cases, prison has taken the place of social services such as drug rehabilitation and mental health counselling and, according to critics of the system, has, in effect, criminalised large portions of the population who would have been much better and much more cheaply treated elsewhere.
Prison guard unions have become major political players, especially in California, home to the single largest prison system in the world, where they bankroll the campaigns of senior state officials and lawmakers. A whole industry has sprung up to support the burgeoning prison population. One writer, Eric Schlosser, memorably described the entire system a few years ago as a "prison-industrial complex".
At a time of tight state budgets, prisons are one area where lawmakers do not hold back from spending lavishly. From next year, California will be spending more on prisons than on its entire higher education system, including close to $1m on a new death row unit at San Quentin outside San Francisco - despite the statewide moratorium on executions. The United States as a whole spends an estimated $60bn a year on its prisons.
by Andrew Gumbel
It also has the highest incarceration rate of any country, with more than two million people behind bars. (China, second in the rankings, has an estimated 1.5 million, and Russia just short of 900,000.) The US has just 5 per cent of the world's population, but 25 per cent of its overall prison population.
Some of the reasons behind the extraordinary machinery of incarceration - including the death penalty - is cultural and historical. In the South, in particular, the phenomenon is inextricably linked to the long history of racial inequality, with blacks put away in numbers vastly disproportionate to their overall population.
The states with the highest ratio of prisoners per population are all former slave states with long traditions of jailhouse brutality, chain gangs and other barbaric practices: Louisiana (816 prisoners per 100,000 people), Texas (694) and Mississippi (669). In many states, blacks are up to 15 times as likely as whites to find themselves behind bars. In Florida, one in three adult black men has a criminal record.
Some trends, though, are more recent - tied, in particular, to the mania for tough-on-crime legislation that has swept state after state in the past 25 years.
The national prison population has quadrupled since 1980, the increase fuelled in particular by the "war on drugs" and the consequent incarceration of hundreds of thousands of petty drug offenders. That, in turn, has exacerbated a host of problems from overcrowding to prison rape to the formation of ultra-violent prison gangs, many of them based on deep racial hatred.
In many cases, prison has taken the place of social services such as drug rehabilitation and mental health counselling and, according to critics of the system, has, in effect, criminalised large portions of the population who would have been much better and much more cheaply treated elsewhere.
Prison guard unions have become major political players, especially in California, home to the single largest prison system in the world, where they bankroll the campaigns of senior state officials and lawmakers. A whole industry has sprung up to support the burgeoning prison population. One writer, Eric Schlosser, memorably described the entire system a few years ago as a "prison-industrial complex".
At a time of tight state budgets, prisons are one area where lawmakers do not hold back from spending lavishly. From next year, California will be spending more on prisons than on its entire higher education system, including close to $1m on a new death row unit at San Quentin outside San Francisco - despite the statewide moratorium on executions. The United States as a whole spends an estimated $60bn a year on its prisons.
by Andrew Gumbel
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Three Speakers to Discuss Death Penalty-Related Topics at New College
Assigned to read a common book on exonerated prison inmates, new students at New College of Florida will follow up their summer reading with death penalty-related presentations by guest speakers who include a local public defender and alumnus, an inmate cleared of a murder-rape conviction and a DNA researcher.
Over the summer, New College freshmen were asked to read "The Exonerated," a short play based on transcripts from trials and interviews with more than 40 exonerated inmates who had received the death penalty. New students will focus on the book during orientation, which is Aug. 22-29. Fall classes at New College begin Aug. 29.
The Court TV film, "The Exonerated," which stars actors Danny Glover, Susan Sarandon, Brian Dennehy and Aidan Quinn, will be shown twice: Monday, Aug. 27, at 7 p.m. and Thursday, Sept. 6, at 6 p.m.; both showings will be in the Teaching Auditorium, Hamilton Center, which is located on New College's campus east of Tamiami Trail.
Three speakers will come to New College for public talks related to "The Exonerated," all speaking in the Teaching Auditorium, Hamilton Center:
l "A Community Conversation on the Death Penalty," Thursday, Aug. 30, 7 p.m.
New College graduate Adam Tebrugge, who has worked for 22 years in the Florida's Public Defenders Office in Sarasota, will lead a discussion on the death penalty. A graduate of the Florida State University College of Law and a board-certified criminal trial attorney, Tebrugge is a frequent speaker on criminal justice issues. He is a member of the Death Penalty Steering Committee of the Florida Public Defender Association and helps to organize the annual "Life Over Death" training conference for attorneys.
l "An Exoneree’s Odyssey," Thursday, Sept. 6, 7:30 p.m., Teaching Auditorium, Hamilton Center
Guest speaker John Restivo served 16 years in prison before DNA tests excluded him from involvement in a 1984 murder and rape in New York. He was sentenced in 1987 to 33-1/3 years to life. The Innocence Project, founded in 1992 to assist prisoners who could be proven innocent through DNA testing, took up his case in 1997. False confessions, use of informants and forensic-science misconduct are cited as contributing causes of Restivo's wrongful conviction. He was exonerated in 2005.
l "Forensic DNA Analysis: Popular Perceptions and Reality," Friday, Sept. 7, 4 p.m.
Dr. Matt Thomas, a senior scientist and laboratory manager at DNAPrint, will speak on forensics in evidence collection. Since joining DNAPrint, Thomas has played an instrumental role in research, development and commercialization of innovative forensics products that have aided investigations around the world. At DNAPrint, Thomas oversees the forensic operations of the company as well as projects dedicated to understanding the genetic makeup of the world populations.
The play, "The Exonerated," which grew out of the Innocence Project, won the 2003 Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Off-Broadway Play, Drama Desk and Lucille Lortel awards, and the LA Ovation Award for Best World Premiere Play. It was nominated for four additional Ovation Awards, three NAACP Theater awards and the John Gassner Playwriting Award.
The play’s 12 subjects ("just like in a jury," wrote one of the authors) were freed through an appeals process that left them imprisoned on death row for as long as 20 years. In each case, crusading lawyers working pro bono, journalism students or investigative reporters worked to overturn the inmates' convictions.
Over the summer, New College freshmen were asked to read "The Exonerated," a short play based on transcripts from trials and interviews with more than 40 exonerated inmates who had received the death penalty. New students will focus on the book during orientation, which is Aug. 22-29. Fall classes at New College begin Aug. 29.
The Court TV film, "The Exonerated," which stars actors Danny Glover, Susan Sarandon, Brian Dennehy and Aidan Quinn, will be shown twice: Monday, Aug. 27, at 7 p.m. and Thursday, Sept. 6, at 6 p.m.; both showings will be in the Teaching Auditorium, Hamilton Center, which is located on New College's campus east of Tamiami Trail.
Three speakers will come to New College for public talks related to "The Exonerated," all speaking in the Teaching Auditorium, Hamilton Center:
l "A Community Conversation on the Death Penalty," Thursday, Aug. 30, 7 p.m.
New College graduate Adam Tebrugge, who has worked for 22 years in the Florida's Public Defenders Office in Sarasota, will lead a discussion on the death penalty. A graduate of the Florida State University College of Law and a board-certified criminal trial attorney, Tebrugge is a frequent speaker on criminal justice issues. He is a member of the Death Penalty Steering Committee of the Florida Public Defender Association and helps to organize the annual "Life Over Death" training conference for attorneys.
l "An Exoneree’s Odyssey," Thursday, Sept. 6, 7:30 p.m., Teaching Auditorium, Hamilton Center
Guest speaker John Restivo served 16 years in prison before DNA tests excluded him from involvement in a 1984 murder and rape in New York. He was sentenced in 1987 to 33-1/3 years to life. The Innocence Project, founded in 1992 to assist prisoners who could be proven innocent through DNA testing, took up his case in 1997. False confessions, use of informants and forensic-science misconduct are cited as contributing causes of Restivo's wrongful conviction. He was exonerated in 2005.
l "Forensic DNA Analysis: Popular Perceptions and Reality," Friday, Sept. 7, 4 p.m.
Dr. Matt Thomas, a senior scientist and laboratory manager at DNAPrint, will speak on forensics in evidence collection. Since joining DNAPrint, Thomas has played an instrumental role in research, development and commercialization of innovative forensics products that have aided investigations around the world. At DNAPrint, Thomas oversees the forensic operations of the company as well as projects dedicated to understanding the genetic makeup of the world populations.
The play, "The Exonerated," which grew out of the Innocence Project, won the 2003 Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Off-Broadway Play, Drama Desk and Lucille Lortel awards, and the LA Ovation Award for Best World Premiere Play. It was nominated for four additional Ovation Awards, three NAACP Theater awards and the John Gassner Playwriting Award.
The play’s 12 subjects ("just like in a jury," wrote one of the authors) were freed through an appeals process that left them imprisoned on death row for as long as 20 years. In each case, crusading lawyers working pro bono, journalism students or investigative reporters worked to overturn the inmates' convictions.
Remaking Prisons: Now's our chance to design a system that actually works
Federal judges Thelton Henderson of San Francisco and Lawrence Karlton of Sacramento lost patience with California’s out-of-control penal system last month, and set in motion what could turn out to be a revolutionary rethinking of the way the state punishes lawbreakers.
They ordered the creation of a three-judge panel to bypass the political whims and pressures of Sacramento lawmakers and produce their own study on how to tame an ever-burgeoning prison population. The top solution being considered is whether to cap the population, and what steps, including home detention and drug-prevention programs, could be used to reduce the number of people behind bars.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has filed an appeal of what amounts to a judicial takeover of at least part of the management of the state prison system. He claims the state is well on its way to ameliorating the crisis without intervention. The governor cites his transferring thousands of prisoners out of state and a $7.4 billion plan to build new prisons as evidence of his good deeds. Critics dismiss his plan to send inmates to Mississippi, Tennessee, or Arizona and his prison construction plan, outlined in Assembly Bill 900, as proof of just how off-kilter our approach to law and order has become.
“What’s criminal about [AB] 900 is that there was supposed to be sentencing reform attached to it, but the reform part got cut off,” says Dave Fratello, co-author of Proposition 36, the initiative approved by voters in 2000 that called for drug treatment instead of incarceration for first- and second-time, non-violent drug-possession offenders. “It shows how spineless our political system is … there’s only one right answer on criminal justice.”
For three decades, that answer has been a keep-getting-tougher approach that keeps digging us in deeper. Since sentence enhancements became a dominant feature of our judicial landscape in the late-’70s, prison capacity has tripled; during the same period, tougher sentencing laws have caused the prison population to mushroom by more than 800 percent. In the last 30 years, Sacramento has issued some 1,000 bills lengthening jail terms. There are now 173,000 inmates in spaces designed for 100,000.
What all this means, critics say, is that perhaps the federal court’s new panel actually gives California a golden, if embarrassing, opportunity to rethink some seriously flawed policies. Just as some urban planning experts are warning that we’ll have to choke on our own traffic jams before we’ll wean ourselves from auto-dependence, so some governmental analysts are arguing that mandatory prison population caps are the only measures severe enough to shock the system into re-evaluating the entrenched sentencing requirements clogging the system.
To say our state’s prisons are grossly, unconscionably filled beyond capacity is akin to noting that the Pope is Catholic. Some 17,000 inmates are currently not housed in cells at all, but are warehoused in formerly communal spaces like recreation rooms, gyms, and hallways, adding insult to injury as overcrowding pushes out rehabilitation programs along with any semblance of a civilized existence. For years, politicians have called these arrangements an embarrassment, yet still they exist. And that’s ironic, according to Fratello. If the state ceased sending minor drug offenders to do hard time, 10,000 inmates could be freed immediately. But that’s only “if we’re willing to be really forward thinking and smart, which there’s no evidence anyone wants to be,” he says.
As it is, in a 2006 report, the Justice Policy Institute determined that Proposition 36 kept 14,000 potential inmates out of the prison system, and accomplished that on a skimpy budget. A UCLA study said the program needs an infusion of $100 million to be considered optimal funding. Currently, due to extraordinary budget pressures, Prop. 36’s measly $120 million funding could be in jeopardy when the state Senate reconvenes later this month, Fratello says, despite the fact that the state typically pays more than $30,000 to house one inmate for one year. “It’s a sickness in the system that we have to scrape and claw for minimal funding for treatment that changes people’s lives and ends people’s criminal careers, when by contrast it’s so easy to throw money at a solution as long as it locks people up,” Fratello says.
Perhaps voters have a right to wonder what all that taxpayer funding is buying them. “Keep in mind that mass imprisonment is no guarantee of safety,” says UC-Berkeley law professor Jonathan Simon. “California experienced significant declines in violent crime during the 1990s while it was locking up record numbers of offenders, but our decline was no better than most states that did not incarcerate at nearly the same rate, and some relatively low incarcerating states, especially New York, did significantly better. Indeed Canada, which has very low incarceration rates compared to California, did just as well.”
Who exactly are we locking up? “There’s a lady in prison now for stealing baby formula for her infant,” says Donna Warren, a spokesperson for Families Against California’s Three Strikes. “Kelly Turner is doing 25 years for writing a bad $500 check to Nordstroms … . There are 4,438 people now doing life for non-violent crimes.”
Fratello estimates that overall, half of our current prison population is considered non-violent. According to Simon, 2005 demographics show that a third of the inmates are locked up for non-violent property crimes, drug charges, or a range of other mostly public order offenses.
“It’s reasonable to suppose that many of these offenders could be handled in the community without setting off a wave of feared crimes,” says Simon, who also co-directs the Berkeley Center for Criminal Justice and is the author of the recent book, Governing through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear. But beyond those who have yet to commit a violent crime, Simon adds that there’s a great deal of criminological research suggesting that almost all offenders – including those who commit serious and violent crimes – are not likely to commit a crime after age 45 or so. These studies have shown that even persistent offenders give up the habit after middle age. “In 2005, more than 36,000 prisoners were 45 or over,” Simon says. “Most of them probably pose little risk if released.”
As for why our legislators can’t keep their hands off the sentencing button, Simon has a theory. “I believe the main explanation lies in the perverse incentives of term limits.” These limits, he says, have created a system demanding legislators make their mark quickly in order to hop from the Assembly to the Senate and on to statewide offices. To do that, a legislator must sponsor a lot of legislation that actually gets enacted, and sentence enhancement bills don’t have very many influential interests to oppose them, while health care and education reform or economic policy changes invariably draw oodles of powerful opposition. Furthermore, term limits offer the added bonus of ensuring that “legislators are not around long enough to get blamed for big structural problems like the prison crises,” Simon adds, meaning it’s going to take more than term- limits reform to effectively eliminate the incentives for tough-on crime legislation, but it wouldn’t be a bad start.
Until then, “Our best hope to achieve more dramatic gains is a charismatic governor willing to build a state wide consensus behind a different approach,” Simon continues. “Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is constitutionally barred from being president and probably doesn’t want to go the U.S. Senate is our best chance in decades. Stay posted.”
For the moment, however, not everyone is as optimistic about Schwarzenegger’s leadership. This spring, the Northern California-based Critical Resistance, an organization protesting what they see as California’s over-reliance on using prisons to treat social ills, says they headed up to Sacramento and handed out copies of their pamphlet 50 Ways to Reduce the Number of People in Prison, but to little avail.
“Our point is, there’s a myriad of ways to reduce the prison population tomorrow,” says Rose Braz, a Critical Resistance campaign director. “We just don’t have the political will. When Schwarzenegger first got into office, he said some really promising things … but very, very quickly that changed and now Schwarzenegger is showing no leadership on this issue and we see things are only getting worse.”
Meanwhile, even the federal judges themselves singled out Schwarzenegger’s AB 900 in particular for criticism, as an idea that could only exacerbate the difficulties of managing the state’s already unwieldy system.
“It’s the largest prison expansion plan in the history of the world,” opines Braz.
Currently, the prison system consumes $10 billion a year overseeing 173,000 inmates. AB 900 is a bond measure borrowing $7.7 billion more to construct 53,000 beds, many of which would come online in 18 to 24 months. That’s too long to wait to achieve dicey results at best, according to Braz. “The federal judges flatly said building will only make the problem larger,” she says. “AB 900 is not a prescription for change, and thanks to 900, we’ll soon be spending more on our prison system than our educational system, despite poll after poll after poll showing that voters don’t support funding prison expansion.”
In fact, in past years, voters here have done more than that; they’ve actively voted down bond measures earmarked for prison construction. In light of these past failures, Braz says the state legislature essentially pushed AB 900 through a loophole.
“When California voters rejected prison construction bonds, the legislature created a fiction,” she says. According to Braz, California’s two methods for approving debt separate out general obligation and lease-revenue bonds – the former must be approved by the public, the latter don’t because they’re typically earmarked for projects like toll bridges, which eventually pay for themselves. “The legislature said, ‘Let’s say prisons are revenue generators, because the department of public works will build them and lease them to the department of corrections,”’ Braz says. “It’s not simple to explain what they’re up to, but the simple way to say it is: the voters have a right to approve debt.” And another calculation getting left out of the equation, she says – paying back AB 900’s $7.7 billion debt is likely to jump to $15 billion once all is said and done. “It violates the letter and the spirit of the constitution,” she says.
Indeed, this all might be much simpler if we just let some inmates walk out of prison. State Sen. Gloria Romero, a Los Angeles Democrat, is hoping that the governor signs her bill calling for a study of which inmates could be released before finishing their sentences.
~ By MINDY FARABEE ~Los Angeles City Beat
They ordered the creation of a three-judge panel to bypass the political whims and pressures of Sacramento lawmakers and produce their own study on how to tame an ever-burgeoning prison population. The top solution being considered is whether to cap the population, and what steps, including home detention and drug-prevention programs, could be used to reduce the number of people behind bars.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has filed an appeal of what amounts to a judicial takeover of at least part of the management of the state prison system. He claims the state is well on its way to ameliorating the crisis without intervention. The governor cites his transferring thousands of prisoners out of state and a $7.4 billion plan to build new prisons as evidence of his good deeds. Critics dismiss his plan to send inmates to Mississippi, Tennessee, or Arizona and his prison construction plan, outlined in Assembly Bill 900, as proof of just how off-kilter our approach to law and order has become.
“What’s criminal about [AB] 900 is that there was supposed to be sentencing reform attached to it, but the reform part got cut off,” says Dave Fratello, co-author of Proposition 36, the initiative approved by voters in 2000 that called for drug treatment instead of incarceration for first- and second-time, non-violent drug-possession offenders. “It shows how spineless our political system is … there’s only one right answer on criminal justice.”
For three decades, that answer has been a keep-getting-tougher approach that keeps digging us in deeper. Since sentence enhancements became a dominant feature of our judicial landscape in the late-’70s, prison capacity has tripled; during the same period, tougher sentencing laws have caused the prison population to mushroom by more than 800 percent. In the last 30 years, Sacramento has issued some 1,000 bills lengthening jail terms. There are now 173,000 inmates in spaces designed for 100,000.
What all this means, critics say, is that perhaps the federal court’s new panel actually gives California a golden, if embarrassing, opportunity to rethink some seriously flawed policies. Just as some urban planning experts are warning that we’ll have to choke on our own traffic jams before we’ll wean ourselves from auto-dependence, so some governmental analysts are arguing that mandatory prison population caps are the only measures severe enough to shock the system into re-evaluating the entrenched sentencing requirements clogging the system.
To say our state’s prisons are grossly, unconscionably filled beyond capacity is akin to noting that the Pope is Catholic. Some 17,000 inmates are currently not housed in cells at all, but are warehoused in formerly communal spaces like recreation rooms, gyms, and hallways, adding insult to injury as overcrowding pushes out rehabilitation programs along with any semblance of a civilized existence. For years, politicians have called these arrangements an embarrassment, yet still they exist. And that’s ironic, according to Fratello. If the state ceased sending minor drug offenders to do hard time, 10,000 inmates could be freed immediately. But that’s only “if we’re willing to be really forward thinking and smart, which there’s no evidence anyone wants to be,” he says.
As it is, in a 2006 report, the Justice Policy Institute determined that Proposition 36 kept 14,000 potential inmates out of the prison system, and accomplished that on a skimpy budget. A UCLA study said the program needs an infusion of $100 million to be considered optimal funding. Currently, due to extraordinary budget pressures, Prop. 36’s measly $120 million funding could be in jeopardy when the state Senate reconvenes later this month, Fratello says, despite the fact that the state typically pays more than $30,000 to house one inmate for one year. “It’s a sickness in the system that we have to scrape and claw for minimal funding for treatment that changes people’s lives and ends people’s criminal careers, when by contrast it’s so easy to throw money at a solution as long as it locks people up,” Fratello says.
Perhaps voters have a right to wonder what all that taxpayer funding is buying them. “Keep in mind that mass imprisonment is no guarantee of safety,” says UC-Berkeley law professor Jonathan Simon. “California experienced significant declines in violent crime during the 1990s while it was locking up record numbers of offenders, but our decline was no better than most states that did not incarcerate at nearly the same rate, and some relatively low incarcerating states, especially New York, did significantly better. Indeed Canada, which has very low incarceration rates compared to California, did just as well.”
Who exactly are we locking up? “There’s a lady in prison now for stealing baby formula for her infant,” says Donna Warren, a spokesperson for Families Against California’s Three Strikes. “Kelly Turner is doing 25 years for writing a bad $500 check to Nordstroms … . There are 4,438 people now doing life for non-violent crimes.”
Fratello estimates that overall, half of our current prison population is considered non-violent. According to Simon, 2005 demographics show that a third of the inmates are locked up for non-violent property crimes, drug charges, or a range of other mostly public order offenses.
“It’s reasonable to suppose that many of these offenders could be handled in the community without setting off a wave of feared crimes,” says Simon, who also co-directs the Berkeley Center for Criminal Justice and is the author of the recent book, Governing through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear. But beyond those who have yet to commit a violent crime, Simon adds that there’s a great deal of criminological research suggesting that almost all offenders – including those who commit serious and violent crimes – are not likely to commit a crime after age 45 or so. These studies have shown that even persistent offenders give up the habit after middle age. “In 2005, more than 36,000 prisoners were 45 or over,” Simon says. “Most of them probably pose little risk if released.”
As for why our legislators can’t keep their hands off the sentencing button, Simon has a theory. “I believe the main explanation lies in the perverse incentives of term limits.” These limits, he says, have created a system demanding legislators make their mark quickly in order to hop from the Assembly to the Senate and on to statewide offices. To do that, a legislator must sponsor a lot of legislation that actually gets enacted, and sentence enhancement bills don’t have very many influential interests to oppose them, while health care and education reform or economic policy changes invariably draw oodles of powerful opposition. Furthermore, term limits offer the added bonus of ensuring that “legislators are not around long enough to get blamed for big structural problems like the prison crises,” Simon adds, meaning it’s going to take more than term- limits reform to effectively eliminate the incentives for tough-on crime legislation, but it wouldn’t be a bad start.
Until then, “Our best hope to achieve more dramatic gains is a charismatic governor willing to build a state wide consensus behind a different approach,” Simon continues. “Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is constitutionally barred from being president and probably doesn’t want to go the U.S. Senate is our best chance in decades. Stay posted.”
For the moment, however, not everyone is as optimistic about Schwarzenegger’s leadership. This spring, the Northern California-based Critical Resistance, an organization protesting what they see as California’s over-reliance on using prisons to treat social ills, says they headed up to Sacramento and handed out copies of their pamphlet 50 Ways to Reduce the Number of People in Prison, but to little avail.
“Our point is, there’s a myriad of ways to reduce the prison population tomorrow,” says Rose Braz, a Critical Resistance campaign director. “We just don’t have the political will. When Schwarzenegger first got into office, he said some really promising things … but very, very quickly that changed and now Schwarzenegger is showing no leadership on this issue and we see things are only getting worse.”
Meanwhile, even the federal judges themselves singled out Schwarzenegger’s AB 900 in particular for criticism, as an idea that could only exacerbate the difficulties of managing the state’s already unwieldy system.
“It’s the largest prison expansion plan in the history of the world,” opines Braz.
Currently, the prison system consumes $10 billion a year overseeing 173,000 inmates. AB 900 is a bond measure borrowing $7.7 billion more to construct 53,000 beds, many of which would come online in 18 to 24 months. That’s too long to wait to achieve dicey results at best, according to Braz. “The federal judges flatly said building will only make the problem larger,” she says. “AB 900 is not a prescription for change, and thanks to 900, we’ll soon be spending more on our prison system than our educational system, despite poll after poll after poll showing that voters don’t support funding prison expansion.”
In fact, in past years, voters here have done more than that; they’ve actively voted down bond measures earmarked for prison construction. In light of these past failures, Braz says the state legislature essentially pushed AB 900 through a loophole.
“When California voters rejected prison construction bonds, the legislature created a fiction,” she says. According to Braz, California’s two methods for approving debt separate out general obligation and lease-revenue bonds – the former must be approved by the public, the latter don’t because they’re typically earmarked for projects like toll bridges, which eventually pay for themselves. “The legislature said, ‘Let’s say prisons are revenue generators, because the department of public works will build them and lease them to the department of corrections,”’ Braz says. “It’s not simple to explain what they’re up to, but the simple way to say it is: the voters have a right to approve debt.” And another calculation getting left out of the equation, she says – paying back AB 900’s $7.7 billion debt is likely to jump to $15 billion once all is said and done. “It violates the letter and the spirit of the constitution,” she says.
Indeed, this all might be much simpler if we just let some inmates walk out of prison. State Sen. Gloria Romero, a Los Angeles Democrat, is hoping that the governor signs her bill calling for a study of which inmates could be released before finishing their sentences.
~ By MINDY FARABEE ~Los Angeles City Beat
Friday, August 03, 2007
Restorative Justice-Texas Style
Who can say when the phrase “Justice, Texas-style” was first uttered? What is certain is that since the state declared independence from Mexico 171 years ago, the term has become synonymous with swift, hard retribution, often accompanied by the cinder-block-splitting end of one of Chuck Norris’s reverse roundhouse kicks.
For the incarcerated, Texas-style justice may indeed feel like a kick in the teeth. Politicians (and since district attorneys and judges are elected in Texas, we include both in that category) sell themselves to voters with a tough-on-crime image, which often translates into cheap-on-rehabilitation policies and practices. The result: Slow case processing, trials weighted in favor of the prosecution, harsher sentences, overcrowded jails and prisons, a high recidivism rate, and so on, so forth, so what? After all, why should law-abiding citizens care about criminals?
In the last few years, a small but growing contingent in Texas has been pushing for a shift in criminal-justice priorities. While our current system of “retributive justice” serves to punish and alienate offenders from society, “restorative justice” is an inclusive theory that aims to repair the harm inflicted on society through offender rehabilitation and victim reconciliation. Under this paradigm, the victim is at the center of the justice process, offenders are held directly accountable, and the community as a whole is urged to participate in the healing process, which is directed at both the victim and the offender.
In late June, proponents of this new approach held the first-ever National Conference on Restorative Justice at Schreiner University in Kerrville, of all places, and it wasn’t just bleeding-heart activists behind it. Organized by the College of Public Policy at the University of Texas at San Antonio and the Source of Light Center at San Antonio’s University Presbyterian Church, the conference featured speakers from across the nation and globe, as well as regional policymakers such as Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle and Bexar County Commissioner Tommy Adkisson.
“The most clear, distinct, measurable, internationally used and empirically grounded form of this movement is what I call ‘restorative justice dialogue,’ and that involves a process where the families most affected by the reality of crime and conflict — communities, victims, offenders, families — have the opportunity to come together to talk about the real human impact of this stuff,” said Dr. Mark Umbreit, the founding director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Restorative Justice and Peacemaking.
Many of the techniques embraced by the restorative justice movement — including victim-offender mediation, family-group conferencing, and community peacemaking circles — were developed in post-conflict countries, such as South Africa, which pioneered victim-offender mediation after the end of Apartheid through their “Truth and Reconciliation Commission.” These techniques were further developed in international contexts, such as Irish-British and Palestinian-Israeli conflicts. Minnesota and Wisconsin are currently hotspots for restorative-justice initiatives, whether it be prison-based programs or reconciliation projects involving Liberian refugees.
Texas may indeed be the next vortex for the movement as professors at UTSA and St. Mary’s University push for restorative-justice curricula and local officials add it to their priorities. As a result, in the next decade, Texas-style justice may become less Chuck Norris and more Nelson Mandela.
For the incarcerated, Texas-style justice may indeed feel like a kick in the teeth. Politicians (and since district attorneys and judges are elected in Texas, we include both in that category) sell themselves to voters with a tough-on-crime image, which often translates into cheap-on-rehabilitation policies and practices. The result: Slow case processing, trials weighted in favor of the prosecution, harsher sentences, overcrowded jails and prisons, a high recidivism rate, and so on, so forth, so what? After all, why should law-abiding citizens care about criminals?
In the last few years, a small but growing contingent in Texas has been pushing for a shift in criminal-justice priorities. While our current system of “retributive justice” serves to punish and alienate offenders from society, “restorative justice” is an inclusive theory that aims to repair the harm inflicted on society through offender rehabilitation and victim reconciliation. Under this paradigm, the victim is at the center of the justice process, offenders are held directly accountable, and the community as a whole is urged to participate in the healing process, which is directed at both the victim and the offender.
In late June, proponents of this new approach held the first-ever National Conference on Restorative Justice at Schreiner University in Kerrville, of all places, and it wasn’t just bleeding-heart activists behind it. Organized by the College of Public Policy at the University of Texas at San Antonio and the Source of Light Center at San Antonio’s University Presbyterian Church, the conference featured speakers from across the nation and globe, as well as regional policymakers such as Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle and Bexar County Commissioner Tommy Adkisson.
“The most clear, distinct, measurable, internationally used and empirically grounded form of this movement is what I call ‘restorative justice dialogue,’ and that involves a process where the families most affected by the reality of crime and conflict — communities, victims, offenders, families — have the opportunity to come together to talk about the real human impact of this stuff,” said Dr. Mark Umbreit, the founding director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Restorative Justice and Peacemaking.
Many of the techniques embraced by the restorative justice movement — including victim-offender mediation, family-group conferencing, and community peacemaking circles — were developed in post-conflict countries, such as South Africa, which pioneered victim-offender mediation after the end of Apartheid through their “Truth and Reconciliation Commission.” These techniques were further developed in international contexts, such as Irish-British and Palestinian-Israeli conflicts. Minnesota and Wisconsin are currently hotspots for restorative-justice initiatives, whether it be prison-based programs or reconciliation projects involving Liberian refugees.
Texas may indeed be the next vortex for the movement as professors at UTSA and St. Mary’s University push for restorative-justice curricula and local officials add it to their priorities. As a result, in the next decade, Texas-style justice may become less Chuck Norris and more Nelson Mandela.
Should we treat drug addiction as a criminal matter or a medical problem?
OK, so you're rich and famous and have a drug problem. You relapse and get arrested. What do you do? It seems the latest trend in countering your likely conviction is not hiring a "dream team" of legal defenders but immediately enrolling in a rehab drug program. Lindsay Lohan, the troubled Hollywood starlet, joins a host of other high-profile celebrities, including Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie and the son of the former vice president, Al Gore III, who have adopted this novel strategy.
Lohan's pal, Paris, just did a brief stint in jail for driving with a suspended license after a previous drunk-driving arrest.
Nicole Richie recently pleaded guilty to driving under the influence from an incident where she was caught driving the wrong way down a Los Angeles freeway last year. She was sentenced to four days in jail and mandated to enter a drug and alcohol program.
Gore was recently arrested for speeding down a highway in his Prius at 100 miles per hour with a small amount of marijuana and a pocket full of different prescription pills. He pleaded guilty to two felony counts of drug possession, among others, and was allowed to enter a drug diversion program. If Gore successfully completes that program, the charges may be dropped.
The role of drugs and drug addiction loom large over these individuals' criminal cases since each enrolled in rehab quickly after their brushes with the law.
Without question, rehab is an essential tool on the road to recovery. It is a multi-tiered, long-term process that enables changes to life patterns that typically trigger the urge to get high. This requires time and effort by the participant.
Lohan was only out of rehab for two weeks when she was busted again for driving under the influence and cocaine possession. Her father, Michael, himself a former addict, was recently released after serving a two-year sentence for a drunk-driving incident. He said his daughter needs a long-term treatment plan to successfully recover from her problems with alcohol and other drugs.
Many were quick to blame the rehab center Lindsay attended, saying it failed her. But no rehab center can produce miracles in such a short period of time.
What most fail to realize is that relapse is an expected part of recovery. Treatment is valid for fighting the demons of addiction and an effective tool in overcoming the government's use of incarceration and punitive measures in response to low-level, nonviolent drug law offenses stemming from addiction.
According to Justice Department statistics, the United States holds a firm lead in maintaining the most prisoners of any country in the world -- now at 2.2 million and rising, and last year recorded the largest increase in the number of people in prisons and jails since 2000. Criminal justice experts attribute the exploding U.S. prison population to harsh sentencing laws and record numbers of drug law offenders, many of whom have substance abuse problems.
Should we treat drug addiction as a criminal matter or a medical problem? For most people, treatment is much more effective than imprisonment for breaking their addictions, yet our prisons are full of drug-addicted individuals. Nonviolent drug offenders should be given an opportunity to receive treatment, not jail time, for their drug use. This would be a more effective (not to mention much more affordable) solution for the individual and the community.
Our 30-plus-year war on drugs has stifled the open debate this country should be having about addiction and how best to deal with it. It is time to treat addiction for what it is, a medical problem, not a criminal one. Even for celebrities who rely on a trend to bail them out and continue driving down that road to oblivion.
Anthony Papa is a communications specialist for the Drug Policy Alliance, a New York group working to reduce the harms of both drug misuse and drug prohibition.
Lohan's pal, Paris, just did a brief stint in jail for driving with a suspended license after a previous drunk-driving arrest.
Nicole Richie recently pleaded guilty to driving under the influence from an incident where she was caught driving the wrong way down a Los Angeles freeway last year. She was sentenced to four days in jail and mandated to enter a drug and alcohol program.
Gore was recently arrested for speeding down a highway in his Prius at 100 miles per hour with a small amount of marijuana and a pocket full of different prescription pills. He pleaded guilty to two felony counts of drug possession, among others, and was allowed to enter a drug diversion program. If Gore successfully completes that program, the charges may be dropped.
The role of drugs and drug addiction loom large over these individuals' criminal cases since each enrolled in rehab quickly after their brushes with the law.
Without question, rehab is an essential tool on the road to recovery. It is a multi-tiered, long-term process that enables changes to life patterns that typically trigger the urge to get high. This requires time and effort by the participant.
Lohan was only out of rehab for two weeks when she was busted again for driving under the influence and cocaine possession. Her father, Michael, himself a former addict, was recently released after serving a two-year sentence for a drunk-driving incident. He said his daughter needs a long-term treatment plan to successfully recover from her problems with alcohol and other drugs.
Many were quick to blame the rehab center Lindsay attended, saying it failed her. But no rehab center can produce miracles in such a short period of time.
What most fail to realize is that relapse is an expected part of recovery. Treatment is valid for fighting the demons of addiction and an effective tool in overcoming the government's use of incarceration and punitive measures in response to low-level, nonviolent drug law offenses stemming from addiction.
According to Justice Department statistics, the United States holds a firm lead in maintaining the most prisoners of any country in the world -- now at 2.2 million and rising, and last year recorded the largest increase in the number of people in prisons and jails since 2000. Criminal justice experts attribute the exploding U.S. prison population to harsh sentencing laws and record numbers of drug law offenders, many of whom have substance abuse problems.
Should we treat drug addiction as a criminal matter or a medical problem? For most people, treatment is much more effective than imprisonment for breaking their addictions, yet our prisons are full of drug-addicted individuals. Nonviolent drug offenders should be given an opportunity to receive treatment, not jail time, for their drug use. This would be a more effective (not to mention much more affordable) solution for the individual and the community.
Our 30-plus-year war on drugs has stifled the open debate this country should be having about addiction and how best to deal with it. It is time to treat addiction for what it is, a medical problem, not a criminal one. Even for celebrities who rely on a trend to bail them out and continue driving down that road to oblivion.
Anthony Papa is a communications specialist for the Drug Policy Alliance, a New York group working to reduce the harms of both drug misuse and drug prohibition.
Thursday, August 02, 2007
Fixing the Scam on Collect Calls
New York’s Gov. Eliot Spitzer set an important example earlier this year when he abandoned the longstanding practice of charging prisoners bankrupting fees for collect calls. Telephone rates in New York have since dropped by about half. Those rates are likely to fall further now that Mr. Spitzer has signed a bill requiring the state to consider the cost of inmate phone calls when it negotiates the next contract for prison telephone services.
That’s a far cry from how business is done elsewhere. In most states, contracts are awarded to the company that pays the state the largest “commission” for such calls — essentially a legalized kickback. The states and the companies both rack up the cash because inmates are only allowed to make collect calls while the person who accepts the call is charged a massive premium, sometimes as much as six times the going rate for regular calls.
This amounts to a hidden tax on inmates’ families, who tend to be among the country’s poorest. It also weakens family ties, making it harder for inmates to make successful transitions to outside life.
Even at a reduced price, the collect-call-only approach is not the only option. The federal prison system uses a more affordable debit calling system, in which inmates use money from computer-controlled accounts. New York and other states should adopt the debit system. No families should have to choose between putting food on the table or accepting a collect call from a loved one behind bars.
A New York Times Editorial July 27, 2007
That’s a far cry from how business is done elsewhere. In most states, contracts are awarded to the company that pays the state the largest “commission” for such calls — essentially a legalized kickback. The states and the companies both rack up the cash because inmates are only allowed to make collect calls while the person who accepts the call is charged a massive premium, sometimes as much as six times the going rate for regular calls.
This amounts to a hidden tax on inmates’ families, who tend to be among the country’s poorest. It also weakens family ties, making it harder for inmates to make successful transitions to outside life.
Even at a reduced price, the collect-call-only approach is not the only option. The federal prison system uses a more affordable debit calling system, in which inmates use money from computer-controlled accounts. New York and other states should adopt the debit system. No families should have to choose between putting food on the table or accepting a collect call from a loved one behind bars.
A New York Times Editorial July 27, 2007
Unlawful Convictions:
LAST week, Judge Nancy Gertner of the Federal District Court in Boston awarded
more than $100 million to four men whom the F.B.I. framed for the 1965 murder of
Edward Deegan, a local gangster. It was compensation for the 30 years the men
spent behind bars while agents withheld evidence that would have cleared them
and put the real killer * a valuable F.B.I. informant, by the name of Vincent
Flemmi * in prison.
Most coverage of the story described it as a bizarre exception in the history of
law enforcement. Unfortunately, this kind of behavior by those whose sworn duty
it is to uphold the law is all too common. In state courts, where most death
sentences are handed down, it occurs regularly.
My recently completed study of the 124 exonerations of death row inmates in
America from 1973 to 2007 indicated that 80, or about two-thirds, of their
so-called wrongful convictions resulted not from good-faith mistakes or errors
but from intentional, willful, malicious prosecutions by criminal justice
personnel. (There were four cases in which a determination could not be made one
way or another.)
Yet too often this behavior is not singled out and identified for what it is.
When a prosecutor puts a witness on the stand whom he knows to be lying, or
fails to turn over evidence favorable to the defense, or when a police officer
manufactures or destroys evidence to further the likelihood of a conviction,
then it is deceptive to term these conscious violations of the law * all of
which I found in my research * as merely mistakes or errors.
Mistakes are good-faith errors * like taking the wrong exit off the highway, or
dialing the wrong telephone number. There is no malice behind them. However,
when officers of the court conspire to convict a defendant of first-degree
murder and send him to death row, they are doing much more than making an
innocent mistake or error. They are breaking the law.
Perhaps this explains why, even when a manifestly innocent man is about to be
executed, a prosecutor can be dead set against reopening an old case. Since so
many wrongful convictions result from official malicious behavior, prosecutors,
policemen, witnesses or even jurors and judges could themselves face jail time
for breaking the law in obtaining an unlawful conviction.
Strangely, our misunderstanding of the real cause underlying most wrongful
convictions is compounded by the very people who work to uncover them. Although
the term “wrongfully convicted” is technically correct, it also has the
potential to be misleading. It leads to the false impression that most inmates
ended up on death row because of good-faith mistakes or errors committed by an
imperfect criminal justice system * not by malicious or unlawful behavior.
For this reason, we need to re-frame the argument and shift our language. If a
death sentence is overturned because of malicious behavior, we should call it
for what it is: an unlawful conviction, not a wrongful one.
In the interest of fairness, it is important to note that those who are
exonerated are not necessarily innocent of the crimes that sent them to death
row. They have simply had their death sentences set aside because of errors that
led to convictions, usually involving the intentional violation of their
constitutional right to a fair and impartial trial. Very seldom does the court
go the next step and actually declare them innocent.
In addition, some of these unlawful convictions resulted from criminal justice
officials trying to do the right thing. (A police officer, say, plants evidence
on a defendant he is convinced is guilty, fearing that the defendant will escape
punishment otherwise.) In cases like these, officers or prosecutors have been
known to “frame a guilty man.”
The malicious or even well-intentioned manipulation of murder cases by
prosecutors and the police underscores why it’s important to discard, once and
for all, the nonsense that so-called wrongful convictions can be eliminated by
introducing better forensic science into the courtroom.
Even if we limit death sentences to cases in which there is “conclusive
scientific evidence” of guilt, as Mitt Romney, the presidential candidate and
former governor of Massachusetts has proposed, we will still not eliminate the
problem of wrongful convictions. The best trained and most honest forensic
scientists can only examine the evidence presented to them; they cannot be
expected to determine if that evidence has been planted, switched or withheld
from the defense.
The cause of malicious unlawful convictions doesn’t rest solely in the imperfect
workings of our criminal justice system * if it did we might be able to remedy
most of it. A crucial part of the problem rests in the hearts and souls of those
whose job it is to uphold the law. That’s why even the most careful strictures
on death penalty cases could fail to prevent the execution of innocent people *
and why we would do well to be more vigilant and specific in articulating the
causes for overturning an unlawful conviction.
By Richard Moran who is a professor of sociology and criminology at Mount Holyoke
College.
more than $100 million to four men whom the F.B.I. framed for the 1965 murder of
Edward Deegan, a local gangster. It was compensation for the 30 years the men
spent behind bars while agents withheld evidence that would have cleared them
and put the real killer * a valuable F.B.I. informant, by the name of Vincent
Flemmi * in prison.
Most coverage of the story described it as a bizarre exception in the history of
law enforcement. Unfortunately, this kind of behavior by those whose sworn duty
it is to uphold the law is all too common. In state courts, where most death
sentences are handed down, it occurs regularly.
My recently completed study of the 124 exonerations of death row inmates in
America from 1973 to 2007 indicated that 80, or about two-thirds, of their
so-called wrongful convictions resulted not from good-faith mistakes or errors
but from intentional, willful, malicious prosecutions by criminal justice
personnel. (There were four cases in which a determination could not be made one
way or another.)
Yet too often this behavior is not singled out and identified for what it is.
When a prosecutor puts a witness on the stand whom he knows to be lying, or
fails to turn over evidence favorable to the defense, or when a police officer
manufactures or destroys evidence to further the likelihood of a conviction,
then it is deceptive to term these conscious violations of the law * all of
which I found in my research * as merely mistakes or errors.
Mistakes are good-faith errors * like taking the wrong exit off the highway, or
dialing the wrong telephone number. There is no malice behind them. However,
when officers of the court conspire to convict a defendant of first-degree
murder and send him to death row, they are doing much more than making an
innocent mistake or error. They are breaking the law.
Perhaps this explains why, even when a manifestly innocent man is about to be
executed, a prosecutor can be dead set against reopening an old case. Since so
many wrongful convictions result from official malicious behavior, prosecutors,
policemen, witnesses or even jurors and judges could themselves face jail time
for breaking the law in obtaining an unlawful conviction.
Strangely, our misunderstanding of the real cause underlying most wrongful
convictions is compounded by the very people who work to uncover them. Although
the term “wrongfully convicted” is technically correct, it also has the
potential to be misleading. It leads to the false impression that most inmates
ended up on death row because of good-faith mistakes or errors committed by an
imperfect criminal justice system * not by malicious or unlawful behavior.
For this reason, we need to re-frame the argument and shift our language. If a
death sentence is overturned because of malicious behavior, we should call it
for what it is: an unlawful conviction, not a wrongful one.
In the interest of fairness, it is important to note that those who are
exonerated are not necessarily innocent of the crimes that sent them to death
row. They have simply had their death sentences set aside because of errors that
led to convictions, usually involving the intentional violation of their
constitutional right to a fair and impartial trial. Very seldom does the court
go the next step and actually declare them innocent.
In addition, some of these unlawful convictions resulted from criminal justice
officials trying to do the right thing. (A police officer, say, plants evidence
on a defendant he is convinced is guilty, fearing that the defendant will escape
punishment otherwise.) In cases like these, officers or prosecutors have been
known to “frame a guilty man.”
The malicious or even well-intentioned manipulation of murder cases by
prosecutors and the police underscores why it’s important to discard, once and
for all, the nonsense that so-called wrongful convictions can be eliminated by
introducing better forensic science into the courtroom.
Even if we limit death sentences to cases in which there is “conclusive
scientific evidence” of guilt, as Mitt Romney, the presidential candidate and
former governor of Massachusetts has proposed, we will still not eliminate the
problem of wrongful convictions. The best trained and most honest forensic
scientists can only examine the evidence presented to them; they cannot be
expected to determine if that evidence has been planted, switched or withheld
from the defense.
The cause of malicious unlawful convictions doesn’t rest solely in the imperfect
workings of our criminal justice system * if it did we might be able to remedy
most of it. A crucial part of the problem rests in the hearts and souls of those
whose job it is to uphold the law. That’s why even the most careful strictures
on death penalty cases could fail to prevent the execution of innocent people *
and why we would do well to be more vigilant and specific in articulating the
causes for overturning an unlawful conviction.
By Richard Moran who is a professor of sociology and criminology at Mount Holyoke
College.
Saturday, July 28, 2007
Pleas on Larry King for Lohan, But What About Other Drug Offenders?
Within hours after ill-fated model-actress Lindsay Lohan was busted on suspicion of drunk driving and drug possession in Santa Monica her teary eye father, and a parade of Hollywood celebrities, and some of Lohan's friends and associates, made sobbing, heart wrenching pleas on the Larry King show for public understanding of Lohan's ordeal. Lohan's attorney made his pitch for public understanding, calling addiction a terrible and vicious disease.
The kid glove protective attitude of many in the entertainment industry toward Lohan is hardly surprising. She has been released each time within hours on low bond, wears a SCRAM monitoring bracelet, and alcohol monitor on her ankle, gets tested regularly, and got top notch treatment at a posh Malibu, California rehab center. Her film," I Know Who Killed Me," which is scheduled for release almost certainly will pack audiences in, if for no other reason out of curiosity and her rogue name.
There's nothing wrong with Lohan's entertainment industry friends, and a star-struck public, pleading for empathy for her and urging the courts to spare her a jail sentence, and to give her the help that she obviously needs. But there are thousands of drug offenders that need the same compassion and help as Lohan. The big difference is that these drug abusers aren't high-profile, bankable screen commodities. They are mostly poor blacks and Latinos. The estimate is that nearly one-fourth of the more than one million blacks that pack America's prisons are there for non-violent, drug-related crimes. It costs billions to keep them there.
Putting them behind bars has had staggering consequences. It has torn apart families and communities. It has been the single biggest reason for the bloat in federal and state spending on prison construction, maintenance, and the escalation in the number of prosecutors needed to handle the flood of drug cases. Also, few poor, black and Latino drug offenders will be immediately released by police, as Lohan continues to be, and then be allowed to luxuriate in a posh drug treatment center.
The pampered treatment of celebrities such as Lohan carries another public pitfall. It could fuel a backlash to the mounting efforts by many drug reform advocates and public officials to push Congress to eliminate the gaping racially-warped disparity in the drug sentencing laws. These laws mandate minimum sentences for petty drug offenses for those tried in federal court. Far more black and Latino drug offenders, than whites, are tried there. Former President Clinton and Attorney General Janet Reno twice gave half-hearted approval to the U.S. Sentencing Commission's recommendation that the drug sentencing laws be softened. Twice Congress has refused to act.
Lohan's repeated busts could also cripple efforts by drug reform advocates to win wider public support for state-wide initiatives such as Proposition 36 passed overwhelmingly by California voters a few years ago. The law mandates treatment, not jail for non-violent, first time drug offenders. Since then, other states have either passed or proposed similar laws that proscribe drug rehab rather than tossing the key on drug offenders. It's part a cost cutting measure, and part recognition that jails have been a grossly ineffective way to fight illicit drug abuse.
Drug warriors loath these initiatives. They claim that treatment, rather than severe jail sentences, encourages drug abusers to laugh at the courts and the law and puts the public at greater peril.
The notion that celebrities such as Lohan thumb their noses at the law has also stoked public anger over the celebrity double standard. That was glaringly evident in the recent tragicomic drama involving Lohan's other bad girl celebrity counterpart, Paris Hilton. Hilton's early release by L.A. County Sheriff Lee Baca brought the wrath of an angry public down on his head. The early release and her later puff ball treatment in jail was a blatant play of the celebrity double standard card. But it did at least momentarily open a small window of opportunity for prison reformers to use the Hilton case to demand the same medical treatment Hilton got for other female inmates.
That window slammed shut fast. L.A county officials haven't uttered a peep since the Hilton episode about spending more on treatment and rehab programs for drug abusers. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's department also has been mute on whether other inmates will get some facsimile of the medical treatment Hilton got.
A few years back a spokes person for the California Department of Corrections publicly declared that they would consider placing repeated celebrity drug abuser Robert Downey, Jr. in a residential treatment facility rather than the county jail. The spokesperson said without a hint that he recognized the celebrity double-standard, "We don't want to just lock them up." He meant the well-to-do and famous, such as Downey and now Lohan, not the thousands of poor and unknown. There are no such qualms about locking them up.
And we darn well know, there's won't be any teary-eyed pleas for understanding for them on the Larry King show.
By Earl Ofari Hutchinson, New America Media
Posted on July 26, 2007, Printed on July 28, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/58065/
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His new book The Latino Challenge to Black America: Towards a Conversation between African-Americans and Hispanics (Middle Passage Press and Hispanic Economics New York) in English and Spanish will be out in October.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/58065/
The kid glove protective attitude of many in the entertainment industry toward Lohan is hardly surprising. She has been released each time within hours on low bond, wears a SCRAM monitoring bracelet, and alcohol monitor on her ankle, gets tested regularly, and got top notch treatment at a posh Malibu, California rehab center. Her film," I Know Who Killed Me," which is scheduled for release almost certainly will pack audiences in, if for no other reason out of curiosity and her rogue name.
There's nothing wrong with Lohan's entertainment industry friends, and a star-struck public, pleading for empathy for her and urging the courts to spare her a jail sentence, and to give her the help that she obviously needs. But there are thousands of drug offenders that need the same compassion and help as Lohan. The big difference is that these drug abusers aren't high-profile, bankable screen commodities. They are mostly poor blacks and Latinos. The estimate is that nearly one-fourth of the more than one million blacks that pack America's prisons are there for non-violent, drug-related crimes. It costs billions to keep them there.
Putting them behind bars has had staggering consequences. It has torn apart families and communities. It has been the single biggest reason for the bloat in federal and state spending on prison construction, maintenance, and the escalation in the number of prosecutors needed to handle the flood of drug cases. Also, few poor, black and Latino drug offenders will be immediately released by police, as Lohan continues to be, and then be allowed to luxuriate in a posh drug treatment center.
The pampered treatment of celebrities such as Lohan carries another public pitfall. It could fuel a backlash to the mounting efforts by many drug reform advocates and public officials to push Congress to eliminate the gaping racially-warped disparity in the drug sentencing laws. These laws mandate minimum sentences for petty drug offenses for those tried in federal court. Far more black and Latino drug offenders, than whites, are tried there. Former President Clinton and Attorney General Janet Reno twice gave half-hearted approval to the U.S. Sentencing Commission's recommendation that the drug sentencing laws be softened. Twice Congress has refused to act.
Lohan's repeated busts could also cripple efforts by drug reform advocates to win wider public support for state-wide initiatives such as Proposition 36 passed overwhelmingly by California voters a few years ago. The law mandates treatment, not jail for non-violent, first time drug offenders. Since then, other states have either passed or proposed similar laws that proscribe drug rehab rather than tossing the key on drug offenders. It's part a cost cutting measure, and part recognition that jails have been a grossly ineffective way to fight illicit drug abuse.
Drug warriors loath these initiatives. They claim that treatment, rather than severe jail sentences, encourages drug abusers to laugh at the courts and the law and puts the public at greater peril.
The notion that celebrities such as Lohan thumb their noses at the law has also stoked public anger over the celebrity double standard. That was glaringly evident in the recent tragicomic drama involving Lohan's other bad girl celebrity counterpart, Paris Hilton. Hilton's early release by L.A. County Sheriff Lee Baca brought the wrath of an angry public down on his head. The early release and her later puff ball treatment in jail was a blatant play of the celebrity double standard card. But it did at least momentarily open a small window of opportunity for prison reformers to use the Hilton case to demand the same medical treatment Hilton got for other female inmates.
That window slammed shut fast. L.A county officials haven't uttered a peep since the Hilton episode about spending more on treatment and rehab programs for drug abusers. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's department also has been mute on whether other inmates will get some facsimile of the medical treatment Hilton got.
A few years back a spokes person for the California Department of Corrections publicly declared that they would consider placing repeated celebrity drug abuser Robert Downey, Jr. in a residential treatment facility rather than the county jail. The spokesperson said without a hint that he recognized the celebrity double-standard, "We don't want to just lock them up." He meant the well-to-do and famous, such as Downey and now Lohan, not the thousands of poor and unknown. There are no such qualms about locking them up.
And we darn well know, there's won't be any teary-eyed pleas for understanding for them on the Larry King show.
By Earl Ofari Hutchinson, New America Media
Posted on July 26, 2007, Printed on July 28, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/58065/
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His new book The Latino Challenge to Black America: Towards a Conversation between African-Americans and Hispanics (Middle Passage Press and Hispanic Economics New York) in English and Spanish will be out in October.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/58065/
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
Drug war enforcement hits minorities hardest
On Ohio Street, just north of Garfield Park in Chicago, three drug dealers stood on a corner surrounded by litter, vacant lots and boarded-up houses, waiting for customers who strolled up on foot and pulled over in cars. Some passed right underneath a flashing police surveillance camera less than a block away.
Only a few weeks earlier in this same West Side neighborhood, Chicago police had shut down a bustling open-air market selling fentanyl-laced heroin, arresting more than a dozen members of the Conservative Vice Lords street gang. A patrol cop later described the bust as an example of the mushroom effect -- pull one out and several more just pop up in its place.
In the suburbs, police say drug dealing has an entirely different, more private face.
"There are some who work out of their apartment or residence, some who will just meet you wherever they feel safe in meeting you. Some people will do it out of their work," said Lombard Police Chief Raymond Byrne. "It's kind of the opposite of the city."
Twenty-five years after President Ronald Reagan declared a war on drugs, many law-enforcement officials and criminologists say drugs are now cheaper and more potent, and as easily available as ever.
What the war did do was help drive the nation's prison population to more than quadruple its size from 1980 to 2005, with urban blacks and Latinos hardest hit -- a dramatically disproportionate result of the different networks that developed to distribute drugs.
According to federal data, blacks make up just 13 percent of the nation's illicit drug users, but they are 32 percent of those arrested for drug violations and 53 percent of those incarcerated in state prisons for drug crimes.
In Illinois, studies show that more than 70 percent of the state's illicit drug users are white, while 14 percent are black. But 65 percent of arrests for drug offenses are of African-Americans. And 66 percent of inmates in Illinois prisons for drug offenses are black, and Illinois' incarceration rate of blacks for drug possession is the highest in the country.
The never-ending flow of drugs, and the disparity in punishment, are leading an increasing number of judges, attorneys and criminologists to the conclusion that the nation's efforts to fight drug use with the criminal justice system will not, by itself, get the job done.
Tim Evans, chief judge of the Circuit Court of Cook County, said more people in the criminal justice system now recognize that treatment and other options are far more effective in reducing drug use.
"There was a thought back in the 1980s that it was better to be tough on crime than to be said not to be tough on crime; that if you just lock these people away that somehow that's going to solve everything," Evans said. "Hasn't worked. And I believe now the pendulum is swinging away from lock 'em up and throw away the key back toward trying to find a rational way of solving this problem."
Impact of 'safe zone' laws
And the more lawmakers try to fine-tune drug laws, the more pronounced the imbalance becomes.
A Tribune analysis of recent "safe zone" laws, increasing penalties for drug sales near schools, churches, parks and other public places, shows the laws blanket many densely populated minority neighborhoods, further boosting the punishment level for urban dealers.
In explaining the disparity in incarceration, criminologists point to a basic difference in the way drugs are sold in cities and suburbs, one that makes African-Americans more vulnerable to arrest and imprisonment for drug possession and sales.
Drug dealing in inner-cities happens largely in open-air markets controlled by street gangs, who run a sophisticated, organized crime enterprise that, police say, is responsible for the bulk of violent crime in urban areas. Police target these marketplaces because that's where most calls for police services originate.
Open-air drug markets are rarer in white, middle- and upper-class neighborhoods, where dope dealing typically occurs within social networks, in places that draw little police attention, criminologists say.
"Police go looking for this stuff in cities where they don't look for it in suburbs because it's not causing the same kind of violence," said John Klofas, a criminologist at the Rochester Institute of Technology. "And if you're only looking at this as punishment for drug use, then it's a complicated set of circumstances that in the end produces this outcome that is, in fact, quite unfair."
In Illinois, the racial disparity in drug arrests is driven mainly by Chicago. In 2005, Chicago police made 47,000 arrests for drug offenses, and 79 percent of those arrests were of African-Americans, according to the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority.
Illinois does not track arrests by ethnicity, so it is impossible to pinpoint how Latinos fit on this spectrum.
But anecdotally, police say black neighborhoods are home to nearly all of Chicago's open-air drug markets, mostly in high-crime, high-poverty areas on the city's South and West Sides. Law-enforcement officials estimate the drug trade is responsible for up to 70 percent of the violent crime in the city.
"Most of the violence in Chicago on the West Side and the South Side is gang-related and it always stems back to some kind of fight over narcotics or narcotics turf or a narcotics corner," said Walter P. Hehner, deputy chief of narcotics prosecutions for the Cook County state's attorney's office. "Drug dealers, hookers, panhandlers, all hanging out there looking for money so they can get high."
Imprisoned at home
Ald. Walter Burnett's West Side 27th Ward was the site of the first open-air drug market shut down by police this year. Burnett said he is constantly fielding calls from residents who want police to shut down drug operations in the area.
Not only do residents feel they are imprisoned in their homes by the gang violence, he said, but they are also frustrated by the constant property crimes and street hustling committed by the drug users traveling into the neighborhood to buy dope.
"They steal everything," Burnett said. "They steal water hoses, they steal garbage cans, they steal gutters off of buildings. They break into houses, they break into cars. If you have children or a wife, you don't want them outside because these [drug users] are going to be walking all around looking like zombies."
Shutting down these outdoor markets is a centerpiece to the police's strategy of attacking guns, gangs and drugs in Chicago. Last year, Chicago police shut down 56 open-air drug markets, amounting to nearly 600 arrests. Frank Limon, chief of the Chicago police's Organized Crime Division, said police are pushing aggressive street operations such as undercover surveillance, drug buys and reverse stings, in which cops pose as drug dealers to snag buyers.
"That's all we continually do is set up operations where we can arrest buyers and go after sellers," Limon said. "Even though it's one corner, it's one less open-air drug market that's available for users to go to."
Police efforts have not gone unnoticed by drug users. Angel, a 32-year-old heroin user from Chicago who frequents West Side open-air markets, said the threat of arrest for buying drugs is greater now than he can remember in his 12 years as a heroin addict. Angel claims that he's been arrested five times for drug possession after buying, and that he's been stopped by police dozens more just being near a West Side drug market.
"It's hot," Angel said. "Hotter now than ever. You go out there at the wrong time and you're just looking to get locked up."
But Angel continues to buy drugs from open-air markets.
"I've been locked up and it's no joke," he said. "But when you're dope sick, you're going to go out and cop."
Nicole, a 21-year-old heroin user from Park Ridge, said it's much easier for her to buy drugs in the suburbs, but she goes to Chicago's West Side markets because she believes the quality is better. Stories of overdoses from fentanyl-laced heroin sold in the city only serve as an enticement for suburban heroin users, she said.
"The twisted part is, when I hear about a spot where people have died because it's so good, I want to go there," Nicole said.
Disturbing trend in Chicago
Chicago alone accounts for two-thirds of all drug offender arrests in Illinois. But what disturbs some like Cook County Assistant Public Defender Kristina Yi is the homogeneity of those arrested for drug crimes passing through the Cook County Criminal Courts building at 26th Street and California Avenue.
"You can't miss once you walk into that building that the majority of civilians coming in for their own cases or a loved one's case are predominantly black people," Yi said. "There are some female blacks arrested for simple possession, some older blacks, very few and far between some Caucasian males brought in for simple possession. But rarely did we get a case that involved someone that's not a minority. Usually they were young male blacks."
Arthur J. Lurigio, professor of criminal justice at Loyola University, said police are simply following reports of crime.
"If you live in a suburb that has a small police department and low crime, the chances of you being stopped when you're walking down the street or driving in your car is significantly less than if you live in Englewood or Harrison or Wentworth," Lurigio said. "The police are not there because they're racists, the police are there because there's more crime there and there's more calls for service there. So if there's more police in a neighborhood, you're just more likely to be stopped, no matter what."
Hehner, of the state's attorney's office, said arrests for drug possession often result from other kinds of police stops -- officers are looking for violent offenders, but they see suspects trying hurriedly to get rid of their drugs, so-called "drop cases." It's an unavoidable part of good police work, he said.
Bob Lee, of the Felony Trial Division at the Cook County's public defender's office in Bridgeview, views it differently. He says many of the drop cases he sees in court stem from police efforts to curtail drug use by sweeping whole neighborhoods.
Paul Butler, a law professor at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., believes that what's driving aggressive policing in black neighborhoods is simple racial profiling. Butler said police, including black officers, selectively enforce the drug laws in the black community because they believe that blacks simply need more drug law enforcement.
"Police and prosecutors use the statistics about the number of African-Americans who get arrested for drug use as a reason to look more closely at African-Americans for that crime," Butler said. "And, of course, if you're especially looking among African-Americans, then you'll find more African-Americans. There's an important relationship between looking for something and finding it."
Not only are blacks more likely to be arrested for possession and sale of drugs, they are also more likely to face stiffer punishment for those crimes because of sentencing enhancements tied to particular drug offenses. Federal law, for instance, mandates tougher sentences for crack cocaine, the smokable version of cocaine popular among inner-city drug users, than for powder cocaine, a form of the drug more prevalent among suburban whites.
Blacks are also disproportionately affected by amendments to the Illinois Controlled Substances Act that prescribe mandatory prison terms for selling drugs within 1,000 feet of places such as schools, churches, public housing and parks. According to the Illinois Department of Corrections, 90 percent of Illinois inmates with a primary offense of violating these so-called "safe zone" laws are African-American.
A Tribune analysis examining the locations of churches, schools, public parks and public housing developments found that nearly 70 percent of Chicago is within 1,000 feet of one or more such site.
A sampling of predominantly African-American neighborhoods in Chicago revealed that 97 percent of East Garfield Park, 99 percent of West Garfield Park, 98 percent of Woodlawn, 96 percent of Englewood and 82 percent of Austin fall within "safe zones."
"Chicago is going to have huge pockets of its square mileage that are in protected zones," said state Sen. Kirk Dillard (R-Hinsdale). "It would be useful to see how the drug-free-zone laws have worked. And if it hasn't worked, either modify it or take it off the statute books."
'Intimate sales' in suburbs
That density of public facilities does not exist in most suburbs. Neither, suburban police say, do the open-air drug markets that make obvious targets.
"Open-air markets are very unusual out here," said Paul Marchese, supervising attorney of the Narcotics and Gang Unit of the DuPage County state's attorney's office. "I've been here for 16 years and I can count in the single digits what we would imagine an open-air drug market in DuPage County."
Without the open-air drug markets and the attendant violent and property crime that orbit them, suburban police officers don't make the huge number of arrests for drug offenses like in Chicago, according to Terry Lemming, statewide drug and gun enforcement coordinator for the Illinois State Police.
"Open-air drug markets are an immediate problem because of all the related violence that goes with them," Lemming said. "The intimate sales of the suburbs are not a situation where the safety of citizens is at risk. The more intimate drug sales in the suburbs have to be attacked with a different way of enforcement."
The disparity in arrests has contributed to a lasting perception that blacks use illegal drugs at much higher rates than other racial groups.
However, a 2003 study by the University of Illinois at Chicago's Survey Research Laboratory found that rates of illicit drug use in Illinois were in fact essentially equal across racial groups. Nationally, similar results were found by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 2005 National Survey on Drug Use and Health.
"One of the very significant misconceptions about drug use is that we sort of spontaneously assume that the majority of people who use illegal drugs would be minorities, which is not true," said Young Ik Cho, a professor with the Survey Research Lab at UIC. "Over and over again we have been emphasizing the fact that it is not really specific or exclusive to certain groups. It's all over."
That's the essential problem with using the criminal justice system to wage a war on drugs, said Camille Kozlowski, a chief of the Cook County public defender's office in Skokie.
"African-Americans and minorities have always been overwhelmingly overrepresented in the criminal justice system," she said. "So it stands to reason when you're going to fight this war on drugs, it's going to be the same thing.
"But if what you're really trying to do is stop people from using drugs, then wouldn't it be logical to go after everyone equally?"
By Darnell Little Chicago Tribune
Only a few weeks earlier in this same West Side neighborhood, Chicago police had shut down a bustling open-air market selling fentanyl-laced heroin, arresting more than a dozen members of the Conservative Vice Lords street gang. A patrol cop later described the bust as an example of the mushroom effect -- pull one out and several more just pop up in its place.
In the suburbs, police say drug dealing has an entirely different, more private face.
"There are some who work out of their apartment or residence, some who will just meet you wherever they feel safe in meeting you. Some people will do it out of their work," said Lombard Police Chief Raymond Byrne. "It's kind of the opposite of the city."
Twenty-five years after President Ronald Reagan declared a war on drugs, many law-enforcement officials and criminologists say drugs are now cheaper and more potent, and as easily available as ever.
What the war did do was help drive the nation's prison population to more than quadruple its size from 1980 to 2005, with urban blacks and Latinos hardest hit -- a dramatically disproportionate result of the different networks that developed to distribute drugs.
According to federal data, blacks make up just 13 percent of the nation's illicit drug users, but they are 32 percent of those arrested for drug violations and 53 percent of those incarcerated in state prisons for drug crimes.
In Illinois, studies show that more than 70 percent of the state's illicit drug users are white, while 14 percent are black. But 65 percent of arrests for drug offenses are of African-Americans. And 66 percent of inmates in Illinois prisons for drug offenses are black, and Illinois' incarceration rate of blacks for drug possession is the highest in the country.
The never-ending flow of drugs, and the disparity in punishment, are leading an increasing number of judges, attorneys and criminologists to the conclusion that the nation's efforts to fight drug use with the criminal justice system will not, by itself, get the job done.
Tim Evans, chief judge of the Circuit Court of Cook County, said more people in the criminal justice system now recognize that treatment and other options are far more effective in reducing drug use.
"There was a thought back in the 1980s that it was better to be tough on crime than to be said not to be tough on crime; that if you just lock these people away that somehow that's going to solve everything," Evans said. "Hasn't worked. And I believe now the pendulum is swinging away from lock 'em up and throw away the key back toward trying to find a rational way of solving this problem."
Impact of 'safe zone' laws
And the more lawmakers try to fine-tune drug laws, the more pronounced the imbalance becomes.
A Tribune analysis of recent "safe zone" laws, increasing penalties for drug sales near schools, churches, parks and other public places, shows the laws blanket many densely populated minority neighborhoods, further boosting the punishment level for urban dealers.
In explaining the disparity in incarceration, criminologists point to a basic difference in the way drugs are sold in cities and suburbs, one that makes African-Americans more vulnerable to arrest and imprisonment for drug possession and sales.
Drug dealing in inner-cities happens largely in open-air markets controlled by street gangs, who run a sophisticated, organized crime enterprise that, police say, is responsible for the bulk of violent crime in urban areas. Police target these marketplaces because that's where most calls for police services originate.
Open-air drug markets are rarer in white, middle- and upper-class neighborhoods, where dope dealing typically occurs within social networks, in places that draw little police attention, criminologists say.
"Police go looking for this stuff in cities where they don't look for it in suburbs because it's not causing the same kind of violence," said John Klofas, a criminologist at the Rochester Institute of Technology. "And if you're only looking at this as punishment for drug use, then it's a complicated set of circumstances that in the end produces this outcome that is, in fact, quite unfair."
In Illinois, the racial disparity in drug arrests is driven mainly by Chicago. In 2005, Chicago police made 47,000 arrests for drug offenses, and 79 percent of those arrests were of African-Americans, according to the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority.
Illinois does not track arrests by ethnicity, so it is impossible to pinpoint how Latinos fit on this spectrum.
But anecdotally, police say black neighborhoods are home to nearly all of Chicago's open-air drug markets, mostly in high-crime, high-poverty areas on the city's South and West Sides. Law-enforcement officials estimate the drug trade is responsible for up to 70 percent of the violent crime in the city.
"Most of the violence in Chicago on the West Side and the South Side is gang-related and it always stems back to some kind of fight over narcotics or narcotics turf or a narcotics corner," said Walter P. Hehner, deputy chief of narcotics prosecutions for the Cook County state's attorney's office. "Drug dealers, hookers, panhandlers, all hanging out there looking for money so they can get high."
Imprisoned at home
Ald. Walter Burnett's West Side 27th Ward was the site of the first open-air drug market shut down by police this year. Burnett said he is constantly fielding calls from residents who want police to shut down drug operations in the area.
Not only do residents feel they are imprisoned in their homes by the gang violence, he said, but they are also frustrated by the constant property crimes and street hustling committed by the drug users traveling into the neighborhood to buy dope.
"They steal everything," Burnett said. "They steal water hoses, they steal garbage cans, they steal gutters off of buildings. They break into houses, they break into cars. If you have children or a wife, you don't want them outside because these [drug users] are going to be walking all around looking like zombies."
Shutting down these outdoor markets is a centerpiece to the police's strategy of attacking guns, gangs and drugs in Chicago. Last year, Chicago police shut down 56 open-air drug markets, amounting to nearly 600 arrests. Frank Limon, chief of the Chicago police's Organized Crime Division, said police are pushing aggressive street operations such as undercover surveillance, drug buys and reverse stings, in which cops pose as drug dealers to snag buyers.
"That's all we continually do is set up operations where we can arrest buyers and go after sellers," Limon said. "Even though it's one corner, it's one less open-air drug market that's available for users to go to."
Police efforts have not gone unnoticed by drug users. Angel, a 32-year-old heroin user from Chicago who frequents West Side open-air markets, said the threat of arrest for buying drugs is greater now than he can remember in his 12 years as a heroin addict. Angel claims that he's been arrested five times for drug possession after buying, and that he's been stopped by police dozens more just being near a West Side drug market.
"It's hot," Angel said. "Hotter now than ever. You go out there at the wrong time and you're just looking to get locked up."
But Angel continues to buy drugs from open-air markets.
"I've been locked up and it's no joke," he said. "But when you're dope sick, you're going to go out and cop."
Nicole, a 21-year-old heroin user from Park Ridge, said it's much easier for her to buy drugs in the suburbs, but she goes to Chicago's West Side markets because she believes the quality is better. Stories of overdoses from fentanyl-laced heroin sold in the city only serve as an enticement for suburban heroin users, she said.
"The twisted part is, when I hear about a spot where people have died because it's so good, I want to go there," Nicole said.
Disturbing trend in Chicago
Chicago alone accounts for two-thirds of all drug offender arrests in Illinois. But what disturbs some like Cook County Assistant Public Defender Kristina Yi is the homogeneity of those arrested for drug crimes passing through the Cook County Criminal Courts building at 26th Street and California Avenue.
"You can't miss once you walk into that building that the majority of civilians coming in for their own cases or a loved one's case are predominantly black people," Yi said. "There are some female blacks arrested for simple possession, some older blacks, very few and far between some Caucasian males brought in for simple possession. But rarely did we get a case that involved someone that's not a minority. Usually they were young male blacks."
Arthur J. Lurigio, professor of criminal justice at Loyola University, said police are simply following reports of crime.
"If you live in a suburb that has a small police department and low crime, the chances of you being stopped when you're walking down the street or driving in your car is significantly less than if you live in Englewood or Harrison or Wentworth," Lurigio said. "The police are not there because they're racists, the police are there because there's more crime there and there's more calls for service there. So if there's more police in a neighborhood, you're just more likely to be stopped, no matter what."
Hehner, of the state's attorney's office, said arrests for drug possession often result from other kinds of police stops -- officers are looking for violent offenders, but they see suspects trying hurriedly to get rid of their drugs, so-called "drop cases." It's an unavoidable part of good police work, he said.
Bob Lee, of the Felony Trial Division at the Cook County's public defender's office in Bridgeview, views it differently. He says many of the drop cases he sees in court stem from police efforts to curtail drug use by sweeping whole neighborhoods.
Paul Butler, a law professor at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., believes that what's driving aggressive policing in black neighborhoods is simple racial profiling. Butler said police, including black officers, selectively enforce the drug laws in the black community because they believe that blacks simply need more drug law enforcement.
"Police and prosecutors use the statistics about the number of African-Americans who get arrested for drug use as a reason to look more closely at African-Americans for that crime," Butler said. "And, of course, if you're especially looking among African-Americans, then you'll find more African-Americans. There's an important relationship between looking for something and finding it."
Not only are blacks more likely to be arrested for possession and sale of drugs, they are also more likely to face stiffer punishment for those crimes because of sentencing enhancements tied to particular drug offenses. Federal law, for instance, mandates tougher sentences for crack cocaine, the smokable version of cocaine popular among inner-city drug users, than for powder cocaine, a form of the drug more prevalent among suburban whites.
Blacks are also disproportionately affected by amendments to the Illinois Controlled Substances Act that prescribe mandatory prison terms for selling drugs within 1,000 feet of places such as schools, churches, public housing and parks. According to the Illinois Department of Corrections, 90 percent of Illinois inmates with a primary offense of violating these so-called "safe zone" laws are African-American.
A Tribune analysis examining the locations of churches, schools, public parks and public housing developments found that nearly 70 percent of Chicago is within 1,000 feet of one or more such site.
A sampling of predominantly African-American neighborhoods in Chicago revealed that 97 percent of East Garfield Park, 99 percent of West Garfield Park, 98 percent of Woodlawn, 96 percent of Englewood and 82 percent of Austin fall within "safe zones."
"Chicago is going to have huge pockets of its square mileage that are in protected zones," said state Sen. Kirk Dillard (R-Hinsdale). "It would be useful to see how the drug-free-zone laws have worked. And if it hasn't worked, either modify it or take it off the statute books."
'Intimate sales' in suburbs
That density of public facilities does not exist in most suburbs. Neither, suburban police say, do the open-air drug markets that make obvious targets.
"Open-air markets are very unusual out here," said Paul Marchese, supervising attorney of the Narcotics and Gang Unit of the DuPage County state's attorney's office. "I've been here for 16 years and I can count in the single digits what we would imagine an open-air drug market in DuPage County."
Without the open-air drug markets and the attendant violent and property crime that orbit them, suburban police officers don't make the huge number of arrests for drug offenses like in Chicago, according to Terry Lemming, statewide drug and gun enforcement coordinator for the Illinois State Police.
"Open-air drug markets are an immediate problem because of all the related violence that goes with them," Lemming said. "The intimate sales of the suburbs are not a situation where the safety of citizens is at risk. The more intimate drug sales in the suburbs have to be attacked with a different way of enforcement."
The disparity in arrests has contributed to a lasting perception that blacks use illegal drugs at much higher rates than other racial groups.
However, a 2003 study by the University of Illinois at Chicago's Survey Research Laboratory found that rates of illicit drug use in Illinois were in fact essentially equal across racial groups. Nationally, similar results were found by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 2005 National Survey on Drug Use and Health.
"One of the very significant misconceptions about drug use is that we sort of spontaneously assume that the majority of people who use illegal drugs would be minorities, which is not true," said Young Ik Cho, a professor with the Survey Research Lab at UIC. "Over and over again we have been emphasizing the fact that it is not really specific or exclusive to certain groups. It's all over."
That's the essential problem with using the criminal justice system to wage a war on drugs, said Camille Kozlowski, a chief of the Cook County public defender's office in Skokie.
"African-Americans and minorities have always been overwhelmingly overrepresented in the criminal justice system," she said. "So it stands to reason when you're going to fight this war on drugs, it's going to be the same thing.
"But if what you're really trying to do is stop people from using drugs, then wouldn't it be logical to go after everyone equally?"
By Darnell Little Chicago Tribune
Monday, July 23, 2007
Study of Wrongful Convictions Raises Questions Beyond DNA:
In April, Jerry Miller, an Illinois man who served 24 years for a rape he did not commit, became the 200th American prisoner cleared by DNA evidence. His case, like the 199 others, represented a catastrophic failure of the criminal justice system.
When an airplane crashes, investigators pore over the wreckage to discover what went wrong and to learn from the experience. The justice system has not done anything similar.
But a new study does. Brandon L. Garrett, a law professor at the University of Virginia, has, for the first time, systematically examined the 200 cases, in which innocent people served an average of 12 years in prison. In each case, of course, the evidence used to convict them was at least flawed and often false — yet juries, trial judges and appellate courts failed to notice.
“A few types of unreliable trial evidence predictably supported wrongful convictions,” Professor Garrett concluded in his study, “Judging Innocence,” to be published in The Columbia Law Review in January.
The leading cause of the wrongful convictions was erroneous identification by eyewitnesses, which occurred 79 percent of the time. In a quarter of the cases, such testimony was the only direct evidence against the defendant.
Faulty forensic evidence was next, present in 55 percent of the cases. In some of those cases, courts put undue weight on evidence with limited value, as when a defendant’s blood type matched evidence from the crime scene. In others, prosecution experts exaggerated, made honest mistakes or committed outright fraud.
Most of the forensic evidence involved problems with the analysis of blood or semen. Forty-two cases featured expert testimony about hair, an area that is, Professor Garrett wrote, “notoriously unreliable.”
Informants testified against the defendants in 18 percent of the cases. (In three cases, it turned out they had an unusually powerful motive for their false testimony, as DNA evidence proved they were in fact guilty of the crime they had pinned on the defendant.)
There were false confessions in 16 percent of the cases, with two-thirds of those involving defendants who were juveniles, mentally retarded or both.
The 200 cases examined in the study are a distinctive subset of criminal cases. More than 90 percent of those exonerated by DNA were convicted of rape, or of both rape and murder, rape being the classic crime in which DNA can categorically prove innocence. For other crimes, there is often no biological evidence or, if there is, it can give only circumstantial hints about guilt or innocence.
Only 14 of those exonerated had been sentenced to death, 13 in rape-murders. There is a widespread misconception that DNA evidence has freed many inmates from death row, but it is actually a rare murder not involving rape in which biological evidence can provide categorical proof of innocence.
“DNA testing is available in fewer than 10 percent of violent crimes,” said Peter Neufeld, a founder of the Innocence Project at Cardozo Law School, which was instrumental in securing many exonerations. “But the same causes of wrongful convictions exist in cases with DNA evidence as in those cases that don’t.”
Professor Garrett’s study strongly suggests, then, that there are thousands of people serving long sentences for crimes they did not commit but who have no hope that DNA can clear them.
In a second forthcoming study of false convictions, this one focused on capital cases, two law professors — Samuel R. Gross of the University of Michigan and Barbara O’Brien of Michigan State — cautioned that “exonerations are highly unrepresentative of wrongful convictions in general.”
“The main thing we can safely conclude from exonerations is that there are many other false convictions that we have not discovered,” the Michigan study said. “In addition, a couple of strong demographic patterns appear to be reliable: black men accused of raping white women face a greater risk of false conviction than other rape defendants; and young suspects, those under 18, are at greater risk of false confession than other suspects.” Professor Garrett also found that exonerated convicts were more apt to be members of minority groups than was the prison population generally. For instance, 73 percent of the convicts cleared of rape charges were black or Hispanic, compared with 37 percent of all rape convicts.
The courts performed miserably in ferreting out the innocent. Thirty-one of the 200 exonerated prisoners, for instance, had appealed to the United States Supreme Court, but the justices refused to hear 30 of the cases. In the one case they did hear, they ruled against the inmate. Of course, appeals courts do not typically reconsider a jury’s factual findings, focusing instead on asserted procedural errors. Only 20 of the 200 even appealed on the ground that they were innocent; none of those claims were granted.
Perhaps the most troubling finding in Professor Garrett’s study was how reluctant the criminal justice system was to allow DNA testing in the first place. Prosecutors often opposed it, and 16 courts initially denied requests for testing.
Yet DNA evidence can do more than free the innocent. In many cases, it also identified the person who actually committed the crime.
In 40 percent of the cases handled by the Innocence Project, Mr. Neufeld said, DNA not only exonerated the innocent prisoner but also provided evidence that helped identify the person who committed the crime. “In every single one of those cases that perpetrator had committed violent crimes in the intervening years,” he said.
The era of DNA exonerations should be a finite one. These days, DNA testing is common on the front end of prosecutions, meaning that in a few years, the window that the 200 exonerations has opened on the justice system will close. We should look carefully through that window while we can.
By ADAM LIPTAK New York Times July 22, 2007
When an airplane crashes, investigators pore over the wreckage to discover what went wrong and to learn from the experience. The justice system has not done anything similar.
But a new study does. Brandon L. Garrett, a law professor at the University of Virginia, has, for the first time, systematically examined the 200 cases, in which innocent people served an average of 12 years in prison. In each case, of course, the evidence used to convict them was at least flawed and often false — yet juries, trial judges and appellate courts failed to notice.
“A few types of unreliable trial evidence predictably supported wrongful convictions,” Professor Garrett concluded in his study, “Judging Innocence,” to be published in The Columbia Law Review in January.
The leading cause of the wrongful convictions was erroneous identification by eyewitnesses, which occurred 79 percent of the time. In a quarter of the cases, such testimony was the only direct evidence against the defendant.
Faulty forensic evidence was next, present in 55 percent of the cases. In some of those cases, courts put undue weight on evidence with limited value, as when a defendant’s blood type matched evidence from the crime scene. In others, prosecution experts exaggerated, made honest mistakes or committed outright fraud.
Most of the forensic evidence involved problems with the analysis of blood or semen. Forty-two cases featured expert testimony about hair, an area that is, Professor Garrett wrote, “notoriously unreliable.”
Informants testified against the defendants in 18 percent of the cases. (In three cases, it turned out they had an unusually powerful motive for their false testimony, as DNA evidence proved they were in fact guilty of the crime they had pinned on the defendant.)
There were false confessions in 16 percent of the cases, with two-thirds of those involving defendants who were juveniles, mentally retarded or both.
The 200 cases examined in the study are a distinctive subset of criminal cases. More than 90 percent of those exonerated by DNA were convicted of rape, or of both rape and murder, rape being the classic crime in which DNA can categorically prove innocence. For other crimes, there is often no biological evidence or, if there is, it can give only circumstantial hints about guilt or innocence.
Only 14 of those exonerated had been sentenced to death, 13 in rape-murders. There is a widespread misconception that DNA evidence has freed many inmates from death row, but it is actually a rare murder not involving rape in which biological evidence can provide categorical proof of innocence.
“DNA testing is available in fewer than 10 percent of violent crimes,” said Peter Neufeld, a founder of the Innocence Project at Cardozo Law School, which was instrumental in securing many exonerations. “But the same causes of wrongful convictions exist in cases with DNA evidence as in those cases that don’t.”
Professor Garrett’s study strongly suggests, then, that there are thousands of people serving long sentences for crimes they did not commit but who have no hope that DNA can clear them.
In a second forthcoming study of false convictions, this one focused on capital cases, two law professors — Samuel R. Gross of the University of Michigan and Barbara O’Brien of Michigan State — cautioned that “exonerations are highly unrepresentative of wrongful convictions in general.”
“The main thing we can safely conclude from exonerations is that there are many other false convictions that we have not discovered,” the Michigan study said. “In addition, a couple of strong demographic patterns appear to be reliable: black men accused of raping white women face a greater risk of false conviction than other rape defendants; and young suspects, those under 18, are at greater risk of false confession than other suspects.” Professor Garrett also found that exonerated convicts were more apt to be members of minority groups than was the prison population generally. For instance, 73 percent of the convicts cleared of rape charges were black or Hispanic, compared with 37 percent of all rape convicts.
The courts performed miserably in ferreting out the innocent. Thirty-one of the 200 exonerated prisoners, for instance, had appealed to the United States Supreme Court, but the justices refused to hear 30 of the cases. In the one case they did hear, they ruled against the inmate. Of course, appeals courts do not typically reconsider a jury’s factual findings, focusing instead on asserted procedural errors. Only 20 of the 200 even appealed on the ground that they were innocent; none of those claims were granted.
Perhaps the most troubling finding in Professor Garrett’s study was how reluctant the criminal justice system was to allow DNA testing in the first place. Prosecutors often opposed it, and 16 courts initially denied requests for testing.
Yet DNA evidence can do more than free the innocent. In many cases, it also identified the person who actually committed the crime.
In 40 percent of the cases handled by the Innocence Project, Mr. Neufeld said, DNA not only exonerated the innocent prisoner but also provided evidence that helped identify the person who committed the crime. “In every single one of those cases that perpetrator had committed violent crimes in the intervening years,” he said.
The era of DNA exonerations should be a finite one. These days, DNA testing is common on the front end of prosecutions, meaning that in a few years, the window that the 200 exonerations has opened on the justice system will close. We should look carefully through that window while we can.
By ADAM LIPTAK New York Times July 22, 2007
Friday, July 13, 2007
A Crack in the System
For the fourth time in 20 years, the U.S. Sentencing Commission has asked lawmakers to reform mandatory cocaine sentencing policy. Might this be the year Congress listens?
A flurry of recent legislative activity may finally signal an end to what critics call a blatantly racist federal sentencing policy. Now over 20 years old, the sentencing guidelines set forth in the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 mandate a minimum incarceration of five years for possession of five grams of crack cocaine -- the same penalty that is triggered for the sale of 500 grams of powder cocaine, or 100-times the minimum quantity for crack. Opposition to the so-called "crack disparity" has grown steadily through the years and today spans the political spectrum from the conservative Rand Corporation to the American Civil Liberties Union. The guidelines have also drawn the ire of more than a few federal judges, some of whom have begun testing the boundaries of the law by refusing to instate the mandatory crack minimum. The seven-member U.S. Sentencing Commission, which serves under presidential appointment, has repeatedly asked Congress to reform the law. In 1995, the Commission attempted to overturn the crack disparity on its own by attaching an amendment to its recommendation, but that effort was defeated by a strong bipartisan backlash. Since then, the Commission has seen fit to leave it up to Congress to reform the guidelines, and has made it a point to say so every five years. That the law has yet to be repealed is a testament to the persistence of age-old fallacies regarding race and class. While drug use rates are similar among all racial groups, African American drug offenders have a 20 percent greater chance of being sentenced to prison than white offenders, according to Commission statistics. In 2005, more than 80 percent of crack cocaine defendants were black. Meanwhile, President Bush's recent commutation of Lewis 'Scooter' Libby's "excessive" 30-month prison sentence for outing a CIA agent has only added insult to injury. "If President Bush truly believes that the power of commutation is necessary to correct injustice, there is no shortage of cases of people languishing in federal prisons for unconscionably lengthy sentences who are deserving of such attention," says Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project, a Washington-based advocacy group. Mauer's group -- along with others such as Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM) and the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) -is part of a vocal coalition aimed at pressuring lawmakers to take action to reform the law. Mauer recently testified before a House subcommittee hearing on mandatory minimums, telling Congress that mandatory penalties for crack cocaine "inevitably result in disproportionate prosecutions of low-level offenders, precisely the opposite of what federal policy should encourage." At its core, the crack law is a glaring example of the bad policy decisions that often follow a national tragedy -- in this case the overdose death of University of Maryland basketball star Len Bias. Within months of Bias' death in June 1986, Congress pushed through the law with overwhelming support from both parties, and in 1988 extended the mandatory penalty to include simple possession of crack. "Congress was responding to a media and political frenzy and passed the law in record time, really, without any input from experts or drug abuse specialists to determine what the appropriate response might be," explains Mauer. "It was a very narrow approach that failed to take into account the broad subject of substance abuse."
"The effect has been significant," says Mauer. "The Sentencing Commission has laid out in clear terms that this policy was a failure; that it isn't an effective way of addressing the problem of drug addiction -- that is, it just isn't working -- and because of the obvious racial disparity that was built into it." The racial component of the law is especially troubling. The Bureau of Justice Statistics found that between 1994 and 2003, the average time African American drug offenders served in prison increased by 77 percent, compared to an increase of 28 percent for white drug offenders. As a result, African Americans now serve, on average, virtually as much time in jail for drug offenses as whites do for violent crimes. "The policy of the federal government is having a devastating effect on our communities and that these laws continue to be maintained show, at the very least, a callous disregard for our people and our communities," said Hilary Shelton, director of the NAACP's Washington Bureau, testifying before the Sentencing Commission in November. "It is this disregard for the fate of our people and our community that continues to erode our confidence in our nation's criminal justice system." This year, as it has four times in the past two decades, the Commission recommended that lawmakers repeal the crack sentencing mandate. In a 202-page report released on May 15, the Commission maintained its consistently held position that the 100-to-1 drug quantity ratio significantly undermines the various congressional objectives set forth in the Sentencing Reform Act and urged Congress to take legislative action to reform the system. Some lawmakers appear to have finally taken that message to heart. "I think increasingly there's been a bipartisan movement for some kind of reform," says Mauer. "Back in 2002, Senators Jeff Sessions and Orrin Hatch introduced a sort of compromise proposal that would have raised the threshold for crack while lowering the threshold for powder. That was significant because it was coming from two leading conservatives. That was a turning point of sorts; I think since then both in the House and Senate there's been more support for change." Currently there are six bills making their way through Congress aimed at addressing the disparity; but not all legislation is created equal. In June, senators Hatch (R-Utah) and Joseph Biden (D-DE) each introduced legislation aimed at reforming the law, and a similar bill introduced in January by Sessions (R-AL) is currently on the docket of the Senate Judiciary Committee. In the House, Representative Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD) and Charles Rangel (D-NY) each have bills pending. But the bills vary greatly in their approach, ranging from Bartlett's Machiavellian H.R. 79 -- which wouldn't reduce the mandatory minimum for crack cocaine at all, but rather would apply the same five-year minimum to powder cocaine -- to Biden's Drug Sentencing Reform and Cocaine Kingpin Trafficking Act of 2007, which would repeal the mandatory minimum for simple possession of crack and focus federal attention away from street-level dealers and onto so-called "cocaine kingpins." In a floor statement introducing the bill, Biden railed against the crack law's misguided rationale. "This is a terrible flaw in the criminal justice system, based on the bogus notions that the crack form of cocaine is inherently more addictive than the powder form and crack users are more violent than powder users," Biden said. "That logic just hasn't played out." A similar bill, the bipartisan Fairness in Drug Sentencing Act of 2007, was introduced by Hatch, along with senators Edward Kennedy (D-MA), Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), and Arlen Specter (R-PA). But like the earlier Sessions bill, it would only reduce the crack/powder disparity to a ratio of 20-to-1, not eliminate it altogether.
For his part, Mauer says it's encouraging that legislators are finally addressing what he calls the "unconscionable racial disparities" inherent in the federal crack sentencing guidelines; but he insists it's only a first step. "This is by far the most significant pace of reform we've seen in some time," says Mauer of the legislation currently in process. "Under the circumstances, I think equalization is the only defensible alternative, but even then they impose a mandatory sentence, which we think is fundamentally flawed. Crack is just part of the broader issue of mandatory minimums, and it's typical of what's wrong with this system."
Christopher Moraff is a Philadelphia-based writer and reporter and a frequent contributor to The American Prospect Online. He is senior editor of the monthly online magazine Common Sense.
A flurry of recent legislative activity may finally signal an end to what critics call a blatantly racist federal sentencing policy. Now over 20 years old, the sentencing guidelines set forth in the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 mandate a minimum incarceration of five years for possession of five grams of crack cocaine -- the same penalty that is triggered for the sale of 500 grams of powder cocaine, or 100-times the minimum quantity for crack. Opposition to the so-called "crack disparity" has grown steadily through the years and today spans the political spectrum from the conservative Rand Corporation to the American Civil Liberties Union. The guidelines have also drawn the ire of more than a few federal judges, some of whom have begun testing the boundaries of the law by refusing to instate the mandatory crack minimum. The seven-member U.S. Sentencing Commission, which serves under presidential appointment, has repeatedly asked Congress to reform the law. In 1995, the Commission attempted to overturn the crack disparity on its own by attaching an amendment to its recommendation, but that effort was defeated by a strong bipartisan backlash. Since then, the Commission has seen fit to leave it up to Congress to reform the guidelines, and has made it a point to say so every five years. That the law has yet to be repealed is a testament to the persistence of age-old fallacies regarding race and class. While drug use rates are similar among all racial groups, African American drug offenders have a 20 percent greater chance of being sentenced to prison than white offenders, according to Commission statistics. In 2005, more than 80 percent of crack cocaine defendants were black. Meanwhile, President Bush's recent commutation of Lewis 'Scooter' Libby's "excessive" 30-month prison sentence for outing a CIA agent has only added insult to injury. "If President Bush truly believes that the power of commutation is necessary to correct injustice, there is no shortage of cases of people languishing in federal prisons for unconscionably lengthy sentences who are deserving of such attention," says Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project, a Washington-based advocacy group. Mauer's group -- along with others such as Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM) and the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) -is part of a vocal coalition aimed at pressuring lawmakers to take action to reform the law. Mauer recently testified before a House subcommittee hearing on mandatory minimums, telling Congress that mandatory penalties for crack cocaine "inevitably result in disproportionate prosecutions of low-level offenders, precisely the opposite of what federal policy should encourage." At its core, the crack law is a glaring example of the bad policy decisions that often follow a national tragedy -- in this case the overdose death of University of Maryland basketball star Len Bias. Within months of Bias' death in June 1986, Congress pushed through the law with overwhelming support from both parties, and in 1988 extended the mandatory penalty to include simple possession of crack. "Congress was responding to a media and political frenzy and passed the law in record time, really, without any input from experts or drug abuse specialists to determine what the appropriate response might be," explains Mauer. "It was a very narrow approach that failed to take into account the broad subject of substance abuse."
"The effect has been significant," says Mauer. "The Sentencing Commission has laid out in clear terms that this policy was a failure; that it isn't an effective way of addressing the problem of drug addiction -- that is, it just isn't working -- and because of the obvious racial disparity that was built into it." The racial component of the law is especially troubling. The Bureau of Justice Statistics found that between 1994 and 2003, the average time African American drug offenders served in prison increased by 77 percent, compared to an increase of 28 percent for white drug offenders. As a result, African Americans now serve, on average, virtually as much time in jail for drug offenses as whites do for violent crimes. "The policy of the federal government is having a devastating effect on our communities and that these laws continue to be maintained show, at the very least, a callous disregard for our people and our communities," said Hilary Shelton, director of the NAACP's Washington Bureau, testifying before the Sentencing Commission in November. "It is this disregard for the fate of our people and our community that continues to erode our confidence in our nation's criminal justice system." This year, as it has four times in the past two decades, the Commission recommended that lawmakers repeal the crack sentencing mandate. In a 202-page report released on May 15, the Commission maintained its consistently held position that the 100-to-1 drug quantity ratio significantly undermines the various congressional objectives set forth in the Sentencing Reform Act and urged Congress to take legislative action to reform the system. Some lawmakers appear to have finally taken that message to heart. "I think increasingly there's been a bipartisan movement for some kind of reform," says Mauer. "Back in 2002, Senators Jeff Sessions and Orrin Hatch introduced a sort of compromise proposal that would have raised the threshold for crack while lowering the threshold for powder. That was significant because it was coming from two leading conservatives. That was a turning point of sorts; I think since then both in the House and Senate there's been more support for change." Currently there are six bills making their way through Congress aimed at addressing the disparity; but not all legislation is created equal. In June, senators Hatch (R-Utah) and Joseph Biden (D-DE) each introduced legislation aimed at reforming the law, and a similar bill introduced in January by Sessions (R-AL) is currently on the docket of the Senate Judiciary Committee. In the House, Representative Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD) and Charles Rangel (D-NY) each have bills pending. But the bills vary greatly in their approach, ranging from Bartlett's Machiavellian H.R. 79 -- which wouldn't reduce the mandatory minimum for crack cocaine at all, but rather would apply the same five-year minimum to powder cocaine -- to Biden's Drug Sentencing Reform and Cocaine Kingpin Trafficking Act of 2007, which would repeal the mandatory minimum for simple possession of crack and focus federal attention away from street-level dealers and onto so-called "cocaine kingpins." In a floor statement introducing the bill, Biden railed against the crack law's misguided rationale. "This is a terrible flaw in the criminal justice system, based on the bogus notions that the crack form of cocaine is inherently more addictive than the powder form and crack users are more violent than powder users," Biden said. "That logic just hasn't played out." A similar bill, the bipartisan Fairness in Drug Sentencing Act of 2007, was introduced by Hatch, along with senators Edward Kennedy (D-MA), Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), and Arlen Specter (R-PA). But like the earlier Sessions bill, it would only reduce the crack/powder disparity to a ratio of 20-to-1, not eliminate it altogether.
For his part, Mauer says it's encouraging that legislators are finally addressing what he calls the "unconscionable racial disparities" inherent in the federal crack sentencing guidelines; but he insists it's only a first step. "This is by far the most significant pace of reform we've seen in some time," says Mauer of the legislation currently in process. "Under the circumstances, I think equalization is the only defensible alternative, but even then they impose a mandatory sentence, which we think is fundamentally flawed. Crack is just part of the broader issue of mandatory minimums, and it's typical of what's wrong with this system."
Christopher Moraff is a Philadelphia-based writer and reporter and a frequent contributor to The American Prospect Online. He is senior editor of the monthly online magazine Common Sense.
Saturday, July 07, 2007
This was one budget cut they refused to make.
Sarasota County commissioners agreed Thursday to direct Sheriff William Balkwill to find $762,000 in cuts elsewhere in his budget and not close the Venice holding facility, as Balkwill proposed at Tuesday's budget workshop.
The facility, though not actually a jail, acts as a station to process South County inmates before they are transported to the jail in Sarasota.
The possible closing of the Venice facility brought strong reactions from Venice Police Chief Julie Williams and North Port Chief Terry Lewis.
Williams said the closing would have a "potentially devastating impact," because it would reduce the number of officers on the road and in the community.
"When I heard they were going to close the facility Tuesday, you could say it shocked me," Williams added.
Lewis agreed, citing he could lose officers for up to five and six hours at a time should they be forced to haul their inmates up to Sarasota for booking.
"I understand the budget constraints the sheriff's office is under, but we're all under constraints," Lewis said.
Pay scales
County Commissioner Shannon Staub believed Balkwill could locate funds elsewhere in his budget to save the Venice holding facility.
"Find $762,000 out of an $85 million budget? I think I could find that," Staub said. "There's all kinds of (cuts) that don't include personnel."
Staub suggested Balkwill could reduce "non-person things" in his budget, such as helicopter flyovers, training and travel.
Commissioner Joe Barbetta suggested Balkwill could cut at least 2-5 percent more from his budget, much of it in salaries.
"Just flipping pages (in Balkwill's budget), I see overtime (totaling) $100,000," Barbetta said. "And when I look at the pay scale of how many majors and captains there are, I don't know if the public understands what the cost is for each one of these -- $120,000, $116,000. Lieutenants, $110,000. There's a lot of high-ranking officers that maybe if you just held back on the promotions for a year or two, you'd find another $1-2 million."
"And has he tried to work with the cities (of North Port and Venice) to see if they would somehow help out?" Staub said.
"I can't state strongly enough that I think the sheriff ought to get together with the chiefs of police in both jurisdictions to come up with a solution," echoed Commissioner Paul Mercier.
Cutting
That was the subject of a letter that went out to Balkwill from the commissioners Thursday, asking him to "see if you might sharpen your pencil a bit more such that you would be able to maintain operations of the Venice facility within your proposed fiscal year 2008 budget."
The letter went on to suggest North Port and Venice "should get together on expenses maintaining the facility" since their operations both benefit through its existence.
Lt. Chuck Lesaltato of the sheriff's office acknowledged receipt of the letter and said a formal answer would come later.
"Sheriff Balkwill needs to go over the numbers again to prepare a response," Lesaltato said.
Balkwill made some points at Tuesday's budget workshop, however, on the topic of how cuts affect his department.
"The more you cut into law enforcement services, the tougher it gets for us," Balkwill said. "When you start cutting back on vehicles, start cutting back on manpower, start cutting back on whether we can give people raises or not, it can have a huge impact. It's hard times right now and it's sad that what's happened in the Legislature is now affecting us in the county."
By Steven J. Smith Sun Herald
Sarasota County commissioners agreed Thursday to direct Sheriff William Balkwill to find $762,000 in cuts elsewhere in his budget and not close the Venice holding facility, as Balkwill proposed at Tuesday's budget workshop.
The facility, though not actually a jail, acts as a station to process South County inmates before they are transported to the jail in Sarasota.
The possible closing of the Venice facility brought strong reactions from Venice Police Chief Julie Williams and North Port Chief Terry Lewis.
Williams said the closing would have a "potentially devastating impact," because it would reduce the number of officers on the road and in the community.
"When I heard they were going to close the facility Tuesday, you could say it shocked me," Williams added.
Lewis agreed, citing he could lose officers for up to five and six hours at a time should they be forced to haul their inmates up to Sarasota for booking.
"I understand the budget constraints the sheriff's office is under, but we're all under constraints," Lewis said.
Pay scales
County Commissioner Shannon Staub believed Balkwill could locate funds elsewhere in his budget to save the Venice holding facility.
"Find $762,000 out of an $85 million budget? I think I could find that," Staub said. "There's all kinds of (cuts) that don't include personnel."
Staub suggested Balkwill could reduce "non-person things" in his budget, such as helicopter flyovers, training and travel.
Commissioner Joe Barbetta suggested Balkwill could cut at least 2-5 percent more from his budget, much of it in salaries.
"Just flipping pages (in Balkwill's budget), I see overtime (totaling) $100,000," Barbetta said. "And when I look at the pay scale of how many majors and captains there are, I don't know if the public understands what the cost is for each one of these -- $120,000, $116,000. Lieutenants, $110,000. There's a lot of high-ranking officers that maybe if you just held back on the promotions for a year or two, you'd find another $1-2 million."
"And has he tried to work with the cities (of North Port and Venice) to see if they would somehow help out?" Staub said.
"I can't state strongly enough that I think the sheriff ought to get together with the chiefs of police in both jurisdictions to come up with a solution," echoed Commissioner Paul Mercier.
Cutting
That was the subject of a letter that went out to Balkwill from the commissioners Thursday, asking him to "see if you might sharpen your pencil a bit more such that you would be able to maintain operations of the Venice facility within your proposed fiscal year 2008 budget."
The letter went on to suggest North Port and Venice "should get together on expenses maintaining the facility" since their operations both benefit through its existence.
Lt. Chuck Lesaltato of the sheriff's office acknowledged receipt of the letter and said a formal answer would come later.
"Sheriff Balkwill needs to go over the numbers again to prepare a response," Lesaltato said.
Balkwill made some points at Tuesday's budget workshop, however, on the topic of how cuts affect his department.
"The more you cut into law enforcement services, the tougher it gets for us," Balkwill said. "When you start cutting back on vehicles, start cutting back on manpower, start cutting back on whether we can give people raises or not, it can have a huge impact. It's hard times right now and it's sad that what's happened in the Legislature is now affecting us in the county."
By Steven J. Smith Sun Herald
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
The War on Drugs is Still a War on Blacks:
The recent survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on the sex and drug habits of Americans is the latest to toss an ugly glare on the naked race-tainted war on drugs. The survey found that whites are much more likely to use drugs than blacks.
Other studies have found roughly equal rates of drug usage by blacks and whites. But what makes the survey more eye-catching is that it didn't solely measure generic drug use, but singled out the use of cocaine and street drugs.
The findings fly in the face of the conventional drug war wisdom that blacks use and deal street drugs while whites use trendy, recreational designer drugs, and that these presumably include powder cocaine. That again calls into question the gaping disparity in drug sentencing between whites and blacks.
More than 70 percent of those prosecuted in federal courts for drug possession and sale (mostly small amounts of crack cocaine) and given stiff mandatory sentences are blacks. Federal prosecutors and lawmakers justify the disparity with the retort that crack cocaine is dangerous and threatening, and leads to waves of gang shoot-outs, turf battles, and thousands of terrorized residents in poor black communities. In some instances, that's true, and police and prosecutors are right to hit back hard at the violence.
But the majority of those who deal and use crack cocaine aren't violent prone gang members, but poor, and increasingly female, young blacks. They clearly need help not jailing.
But it's a myth that powder cocaine is benign and has no criminal and violent taint to it. In a comprehensive survey in 2002, the Office of National Drug Control Policy, the White House's low profile task force to combat drug use, attributed shoplifting, burglary, theft, larceny, money laundering and even the transport of undocumented workers in some cities to powdered cocaine use. It also found that powder cocaine users were more likely to commit domestic violence crimes. The report also fingered powder cocaine users as prime dealers of other drugs that included heroin, meth and crack cocaine.
Even more revealing, they sold crack cocaine and heroin in inner city neighborhoods. The top-heavy drug use by young whites -- and the crime and violence that go with it -- has stirred no public outcry for mass arrests, prosecutions, and tough prison sentences for white drug dealers, many of whom deal drugs that are directly linked to serious crime and violence. Whites unlucky enough to get popped for drug possession are treated with compassion, prayer sessions, expensive psychiatric counseling, treatment and rehab programs, and drug diversion programs. And they should be. But so should those blacks and other non-whites victimized by discriminatory drug laws.
Voters and legislators in California, New York, Michigan and other states now recognize that bankrupting state budgets to lock up nonviolent drug offenders won't win the war on drugs. They have opted for drug diversion, treatment and counseling programs rather than jail as the far more effective, humane, and cost effective way to deal with drug users. This has brought some measure of sanity back to drug enforcement policy. But that doesn't sit well with the drug warriors; they have and will continue to resist any effort to get Congress to modify or scrap the blatant and deliberate racial disparity in drug sentencing laws.
In an odd way, they have to take their hard stand. The public scapegoating of blacks for America's drug problem during the past two decades has been relentless. A frank admission that the laws are biased and unfair, and have not done much to combat the drug plague, would be an admission of failure. It could ignite a real soul searching over whether all the billions of dollars that have been squandered in the failed and flawed drug war -- the lives ruined by it, and the families torn apart by the rigid and unequal enforcement of the laws -- has really accomplished anything.
This might call into question why people use and abuse drugs in the first place -- and if it is really the government's business to turn the legal screws on some drug users while turning a blind eye to others?
The greatest fallout from our failed drug policy is that it further embeds the widespread notion that the drug problem is exclusively a black problem. This makes it easy for on-the-make politicians to grab votes, garner press attention, and bloat state prison budgets to jail more black offenders, while continuing to feed the illusion that we are winning the drug war.
The CDC survey is smoking gun proof of one thing: As long as state and federal officials ruthlessly hunt for drug culprits in poor black communities, that illusion will continue to wreck lives, mostly black lives.
By Earl Ofari Hutchinson, New America Media
Posted on June 27, 2007, Printed on June 27, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/55403/
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His new book The Latino Challenge to Black America: Towards a Conversation between African-Americans and Hispanics (Middle Passage Press and Hispanic Economics New York) in English and Spanish will be out in October.
Other studies have found roughly equal rates of drug usage by blacks and whites. But what makes the survey more eye-catching is that it didn't solely measure generic drug use, but singled out the use of cocaine and street drugs.
The findings fly in the face of the conventional drug war wisdom that blacks use and deal street drugs while whites use trendy, recreational designer drugs, and that these presumably include powder cocaine. That again calls into question the gaping disparity in drug sentencing between whites and blacks.
More than 70 percent of those prosecuted in federal courts for drug possession and sale (mostly small amounts of crack cocaine) and given stiff mandatory sentences are blacks. Federal prosecutors and lawmakers justify the disparity with the retort that crack cocaine is dangerous and threatening, and leads to waves of gang shoot-outs, turf battles, and thousands of terrorized residents in poor black communities. In some instances, that's true, and police and prosecutors are right to hit back hard at the violence.
But the majority of those who deal and use crack cocaine aren't violent prone gang members, but poor, and increasingly female, young blacks. They clearly need help not jailing.
But it's a myth that powder cocaine is benign and has no criminal and violent taint to it. In a comprehensive survey in 2002, the Office of National Drug Control Policy, the White House's low profile task force to combat drug use, attributed shoplifting, burglary, theft, larceny, money laundering and even the transport of undocumented workers in some cities to powdered cocaine use. It also found that powder cocaine users were more likely to commit domestic violence crimes. The report also fingered powder cocaine users as prime dealers of other drugs that included heroin, meth and crack cocaine.
Even more revealing, they sold crack cocaine and heroin in inner city neighborhoods. The top-heavy drug use by young whites -- and the crime and violence that go with it -- has stirred no public outcry for mass arrests, prosecutions, and tough prison sentences for white drug dealers, many of whom deal drugs that are directly linked to serious crime and violence. Whites unlucky enough to get popped for drug possession are treated with compassion, prayer sessions, expensive psychiatric counseling, treatment and rehab programs, and drug diversion programs. And they should be. But so should those blacks and other non-whites victimized by discriminatory drug laws.
Voters and legislators in California, New York, Michigan and other states now recognize that bankrupting state budgets to lock up nonviolent drug offenders won't win the war on drugs. They have opted for drug diversion, treatment and counseling programs rather than jail as the far more effective, humane, and cost effective way to deal with drug users. This has brought some measure of sanity back to drug enforcement policy. But that doesn't sit well with the drug warriors; they have and will continue to resist any effort to get Congress to modify or scrap the blatant and deliberate racial disparity in drug sentencing laws.
In an odd way, they have to take their hard stand. The public scapegoating of blacks for America's drug problem during the past two decades has been relentless. A frank admission that the laws are biased and unfair, and have not done much to combat the drug plague, would be an admission of failure. It could ignite a real soul searching over whether all the billions of dollars that have been squandered in the failed and flawed drug war -- the lives ruined by it, and the families torn apart by the rigid and unequal enforcement of the laws -- has really accomplished anything.
This might call into question why people use and abuse drugs in the first place -- and if it is really the government's business to turn the legal screws on some drug users while turning a blind eye to others?
The greatest fallout from our failed drug policy is that it further embeds the widespread notion that the drug problem is exclusively a black problem. This makes it easy for on-the-make politicians to grab votes, garner press attention, and bloat state prison budgets to jail more black offenders, while continuing to feed the illusion that we are winning the drug war.
The CDC survey is smoking gun proof of one thing: As long as state and federal officials ruthlessly hunt for drug culprits in poor black communities, that illusion will continue to wreck lives, mostly black lives.
By Earl Ofari Hutchinson, New America Media
Posted on June 27, 2007, Printed on June 27, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/55403/
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His new book The Latino Challenge to Black America: Towards a Conversation between African-Americans and Hispanics (Middle Passage Press and Hispanic Economics New York) in English and Spanish will be out in October.
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