Pubdate: Mon, 31 Jul 2000
Source: Salon.com (US Web)
Copyright: 2000 Salon.com
Contact:  22 4th Street, 16th Floor San Francisco, CA 94103
Fax: (415) 645-9204
Feedback: http://www.salon.com/contact/letters/
Website: http://www.salon.com/
Forum: http://tabletalk.salon.com/
Author: Bruce Shapiro, National Correspondant For Salon News
Cited: Justice Policy Institute http://www.cjcj.org/drug/

HARD TIME FOR SOFT CRIMES

In Philadelphia in 1790, not too far from the site of next week's 
Republican National Convention, the state of Pennsylvania inaugurated an 
American experiment: the Walnut Street Penitentiary. It was the first 
modern prison, and it replaced the stocks, the gallows and beatings with 
solitary confinement and enforced silence.

I doubt any convention speakers will invoke the Walnut Street Penitentiary 
from the convention platform. They'll probably stick to the Liberty Bell 
and Ben Franklin. But the original American prison might be the better 
symbol, as a national study released Thursday by a Washington 
criminal-justice think tank makes clear.

"Poor Prescription: the Costs of Imprisoning Drug Offenders in the United 
States," published by the Justice Policy Institute reveals in stark terms 
the consequences of the bipartisan, two-decade love affair with mandatory 
sentences and harsh drug policies. The nation's prison population now 
stands at 2 million, but according to the report, this has less to do with 
making streets safer than with locking up nonviolent drug users.

According to the Justice Policy Institute study, while the number of people 
in state prisons for violent crime has doubled since 1980, the number of 
nonviolent offenders behind bars has tripled -- and the number of people 
incarcerated for drug offenses has gone up more than 11-fold.

Appearing on the eve of the Republican convention, the Justice Policy 
Institute's study also underscores a historic irony: In many cases it is 
Republicans, not Democrats, who are beginning to ask the hard questions 
about the drug war -- including some prominent Republican officials who 
will be descending on Philadelphia.

One of them is California Rep. Tom Campbell of Silicon Valley, who took 
part in the Justice Policy Institute's press conference on the study. 
Campbell, now running for Senate against ardent drug-warrior Democrat 
Dianne Feinstein is by his own admission, "pretty far out there" in 
traditional Republican terms, arguing for medicinal marijuana, treatment in 
place of prison and Zurich-style experiments with supplying addicts with 
their fix. Campbell will address the alternative "Shadow Convention" on 
Tuesday about the drug war issue.

But while he is a maverick, Campbell is not as isolated as he would have 
been, say, at the last Republican National Convention. Just as it was 
Republican Gov. George Ryan of Illinois who imposed the first death penalty 
moratorium, recently a handful of Republican leaders have taken more than 
tentative steps into drug reform terrain, which until now was considered 
off-limits to any serious politician.

Michigan's Republican governor, John Engler, for instance, has endorsed 
modifying his state's mandatory sentencing for drug offenders. New York 
Gov. George Pataki talks openly of reforming the state's notorious 
Rockefeller drug laws, responsible for one-third of all New York prisoners 
and the archetype for a generation of punitive drug laws nationwide. New 
Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson supports the legalization of medicinal marijuana 
and turning from prison to treatment programs for addicts. Even 
Pennsylvania's Arlen Specter, a former prosecutor, has taken the first 
steps toward questioning the national drug strategy -- defying GOP 
leadership to vote against a massive military aid bill for Columbia.

How has the party of law-and-order Reaganism suddenly turned into a forum 
for debate over drug policy?

"In part, there is an intellectual tradition which has paved the way," says 
Ethan Nadelman of the Lindesmith Center, the leading drug-policy reform 
think tank. "There is a libertarian streak in the Republican Party which 
has always favored a different approach." Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, 
columnist William F. Buckley and former Secretary of State George Shultz 
have all denounced the drug war as an infringement on individual freedom 
and choice.

But the small cadre of new GOP drug reformers like Campbell and Johnson 
represent a new phenomenon. "I am not coming at this as a libertarian," 
says Campbell. "I am a traditional Republican in that I value smaller 
government, limited government, and the drug war seems the opposite of 
that. But what really persuades me, candidly, is the pragmatics of it."

Campbell remembers voting in 1988 -- his first term in Congress -- for a 
bill that tried to combine cocaine interdiction with subsidizing imports of 
Latin American flowers -- hoping to convert growers from coke to blossoms. 
"I was full of optimism, even though flower growers in my district were 
furious. But you know what happened? Flower imports increased -- but so did 
coke. Interdiction is a losing game. Extermination of the drug crop is a 
losing game."

Campbell began to rethink his drug-policy position almost by accident. A 
former law professor interested in tort reform, he began studying research 
by the Rand Corp. Some of Rand's litigation-reform experts were also 
looking at drug policy. "I became convinced that the drug war as we know it 
now is a dead end. It comes down to this: Do we want to get people off 
drugs, or do we want them in jail? Do we want to reduce violent crime? Then 
we've got to take away the incentive for violence, for getting the money to 
buy drugs or for fighting over turf to sell it."

The Democrats, of course, have their drug reformers. John Conyers of 
Michigan, ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, last week 
proposed federal funding for states that seek to divert nonviolent drug 
offenders into treatment instead of prison. "The federal government must 
support alternatives to wholesale incarceration," he says. And Sen. Patrick 
Leahy of Vermont has promised that if Democrats win the Senate and he 
becomes chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he'll make drug reform 
a priority. But at the national level, few Democrats are as outspoken as 
the most prominent Republican drug reformers. The risk of being seen as 
soft on crime, or as a 1960s counterculture holdover, seems too great for 
many Democratic politicians. And they would be fighting their own 
president's administration: Drug czar Barry McCaffrey has fought harm 
reduction at every turn, even pressuring Health and Human Services 
Secretary Donna Shalala into abandoning a planned endorsement of needle 
exchange programs.

In other words, says Vincent Schiraldi, director of the Justice Policy 
Institute and one of the authors of the new report: "Nixon can go to China 
on this one."

Going state by state, the Justice Policy Institute report contains some 
shockers about Republican and Democratic administrations alike.

It turns out, for instance, that when it comes to harsh drug policy, the 
frontier justice of George W. Bush's Texas can't hold a candle to 
California, which locks up a higher percentage of its citizens for drug 
offenses than any other state: The number of Californians incarcerated for 
drug crimes has gone up 25 times in 20 years, to 44,000 -- twice the 
state's entire prison population in 1980.

On the other hand, Texas comes off as a particularly horrifying place for 
racially biased drug laws. Although survey after survey shows that whites 
and African-Americans use drugs at about the same rate, in Texas and other 
states Schiraldi's team surveyed -- Hawaii, South Carolina, North Carolina, 
Maine and Virginia -- drug imprisonment for whites fell over the last 
decade while incarceration of black drug users rose two to eight times.

"That was stunning, even to me," Schiraldi admits. "We expected to see 
blacks going to prison in larger numbers, but to find so many places where 
white drug incarceration fell at the same time -- that's a new floor."

Nearly 1 in 4 people in prison in the United States, the survey finds, is 
there for a drug offense -- and the number of drug offenders locked up 
today "is roughly the same as the entire prison and jail population in 1980."

As Republicans gather in the city that gave birth to the penitentiary, here 
is something to ponder. In the early 1970s when Al Gore was in Vietnam, and 
when George W. Bush was flying planes around Texas to avoid Vietnam, the 
nation's prison population stood at 200,000. Back then that number was a 
big deal: Prison riots in New York and California made the front page, 
books about prison life made the bestseller list.

Today, the prison population stands at 2 million. As Schiraldi says, "We've 
got a population the size of Washington, D.C., locked up for drug offenses 
alone." The war on drugs is increasingly looking like this generation's 
Vietnam. But the war in Vietnam, which shaped the lives of this year's 
candidates, was at least debated at the conventions of 1972. About this 
decade's war, however, the silence inside the convention halls of 
Republicans and Democrats alike is deafening.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Terry Liittschwager