Pubdate: Tue, 13 Aug 2013
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2013 The New York Times Company
Contact: http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/lettertoeditor.html
Website: http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Authors: Charlies Savage and Erica Goode

AN ABOUT-FACE ON CRIME

WASHINGTON - Two decisions Monday, one by a federal judge in New York 
and the other by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., were powerful 
signals that the pendulum has swung away from the tough-on-crime 
policies of a generation ago. Those policies have been denounced as 
discriminatory and responsible for explosive growth in the prison population.

Critics have long contended that draconian mandatory minimum sentence 
laws for low-level drug offenses, as well as stop-and-frisk police 
policies that target higher-crime and minority neighborhoods, have a 
disproportionate impact on members of minority groups. On Monday, Mr. 
Holder announced that federal prosecutors would no longer invoke the 
sentencing laws, and a judge found that stop-and-frisk practices in 
New York were unconstitutional racial profiling.

While the timing was a coincidence, Barbara Arnwine, the president of 
the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said that the 
effect was "historic, ground-breaking, and potentially game-changing."

"I thought that the most important significance of both events was 
the sense of enough is enough," said Ms. Arnwine, who attended the 
speech in San Francisco where Mr. Holder unveiled the new Justice 
Department policy. "It's a feeling that this is the moment to make 
needed change. This just can't continue, this level of extreme 
heightened injustice in our policing, our law enforcement and our 
criminal justice system."

A generation ago, amid a crack epidemic, state and federal lawmakers 
enacted a wave of tough-on-crime measures that resulted in an 800 
percent increase in the number of prisoners in the United States, 
even as the population grew by only a third. The spike in prisoners 
centered on an increase in the number of African-American and 
Hispanic men convicted of drug crimes; blacks are about six times as 
likely as whites to be incarcerated.

But the crack wave has long since passed and violent crime rates have 
plummeted to four-decade lows, in the process reducing crime as a 
salient political issue. Traditionally conservative states, driven by 
a need to save money on building and maintaining prisons, have taken 
the lead in scaling back policies of mass incarceration. Against that 
backdrop, the move away from mandatory sentences and Judge Shira A. 
Scheindlin's ruling on stop-and-frisk practices signaled that a 
course correction on two big criminal justice issues that 
disproportionately affect minorities has finally been made, according 
to the advocates who have pushed for those changes.

"I think that there is a sea change now of thinking around the impact 
of over-incarceration and selective enforcement in our criminal 
justice system on racial minorities," said Vanita Gupta of the 
American Civil Liberties Union. "These are hugely significant and 
symbolic events, because we would not have either of these even five 
years ago."

Michelle Alexander, an Ohio State University law professor who wrote 
"The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness," 
an influential 2010 book about the racial impact of policies like 
stop-and-frisk and mandatory minimum drug sentences, said the two 
developments gave her a sense of "cautious optimism."

"For those of us who have become increasingly alarmed over the years 
at the millions of lives that have been wasted due to the drug war 
and the types of police tactics that have been deployed in the 
get-tough-on-crime movement, today's announcements give us fresh hope 
that there is, in fact, a growing public consensus that the path that 
we, the nation, have been on for the past 40 years has been deeply 
misguided and has caused far more harm and suffering than it has 
prevented," she said.

But not everyone was celebrating. William G. Otis, a former federal 
prosecutor and an adjunct professor at Georgetown Law School, 
described Mr. Holder's move as a victory for drug dealers that would 
incentivize greater sales of addictive contraband, and he suggested 
that the stop-and-frisk ruling could be overturned on appeal.

Mr. Otis also warned that society was becoming "complacent" and 
forgetting that the drug and sentencing policies enacted over the 
last three decades had contributed to the falling crime rates.

Yet Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research 
Forum, a Washington-based research group, said many police chiefs 
agreed that it was time to rethink mandatory sentencing for low-level 
drug offenses. And he said departments across the country would 
examine the stop-and-frisk ruling in New York "to see if their 
practices pass muster."

But he added: "You can't get away from the fact that in most large 
cities, crime is concentrated in poor areas which are predominantly 
minority. The question becomes, what tactics are acceptable in those 
communities to reduce crime? And there is a trade-off between the 
tactics that may be used and the issue of fairness."

David Rudovsky, a civil rights lawyer in Philadelphia who has been 
involved in a lawsuit over stop-and-frisk in that city, said both 
Holder's announcement and the ruling were "part of a national 
re-examination of criminal justice policy that has been spurred for 
the last 40 years by a fear of crime."

As that fear has lessened, he added, there has been more room to be 
heard for critics who say that some policies have gone too far and 
may be counterproductive. Those critics cite the low rate of finding 
guns with stop-and-frisk actions, and say that the experience of 
being searched - and the consequences if drugs are discovered - 
alienate people in targeted communities, making them less willing to 
give the police information about more serious violent crimes.

"There was the thought that if we stop, frisk, arrest and incarcerate 
huge numbers of people, that will reduce crime," Rudovsky said. "But 
while that may have had some effect on crime, the negative parts 
outweighed the positive parts."

Critics have argued that aggressive policing in minority 
neighborhoods can distort overall crime statistics. Federal data 
show, for example, that black Americans were nearly four times as 
likely as whites to be arrested on charges of marijuana possession in 
2010, even though the two groups used the drug at similar rates.

"There is just as much drugs going on in the Upper East Side of New 
York or Cleveland Park in D.C.," said Jamie Fellner, a specialist on 
race and criminal drug law enforcement for Human Rights Watch, citing 
predominantly affluent and white neighborhoods. "But that is not 
where police are doing their searches for drugs."

Alfred Blumstein, a Carnegie Mellon professor who has studied race 
and incarceration issues, said Mr. Holder's speech and Judge 
Scheindlin's stop-and-frisk ruling both addressed policies that "were 
attempts to stop crime, but they weren't terribly effective."

Together, he said, the events indicated that society was "trying to 
become more effective and more targeted and, in the process, to 
reduce the heavy impact on particularly African-Americans."
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom