Pubdate: Mon, 19 Aug 2013
Source: Toronto Star (CN ON)
Copyright: 2013 The Toronto Star
Contact:  http://www.thestar.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/456

OUT OF STEP ON DRUG WAR

Harper's crime legislation, designed for the George Bush era, is an 
anachronism in the Barack Obama presidency

For 40 years, the United States conducted an unremitting, 
staggeringly expensive war on drugs.

For at least 30 of those years, Washington sent a succession of "drug 
czars" to Ottawa to press the Canadian government to get tough on 
dealers, traffickers and addicts.

Finally in 2006, the U.S. got a willing partner in Ottawa. Prime 
Minister Stephen Harper took office vowing to crack down on crime, 
get drugs and guns off the streets, lock up dangerous young offenders 
and reduce the discretion of judges to set lenient sentences.

It took the Prime Minister six years to get his controversial crime 
legislation through Parliament, but he finally succeeded last year. 
The centrepiece of his law-and-order agenda was a series of mandatory 
minimum sentences, many for drug crimes. They ranged from a jail term 
of six months for growing six or more marijuana plants to three years 
behind bars for operating a methamphetamine lab in a residential neighbourhood.

But now, with Canadian courts and prisons ramping up for more trials, 
more incarceration and longer sentences, the U.S. has changed 
direction. It is de-escalating its war on drugs, shelving mandatory 
minimums and allowing judges to divert non-violent offenders into 
drug treatment and job training programs.

"Too many Americans go to too many prisons for far too long and for 
no truly good law enforcement reason," U.S. Attorney General Eric 
Holder said in a direction-changing speech this past week. He told 
the nation's lawyers the White House was ordering "a fundamentally 
new approach."

The reasons for the shift were painfully obvious. The crime rate was 
falling. The cost of keeping 1.57 million Americans in overcrowded 
prisons - roughly $800 billion a year - was more than U.S. taxpayers 
could bear. The public had soured on the Nixon-era tactics that 
police and prosecutors used to put drug offenders who posed no risk 
to society behind bars for decades. And there was little evidence 
that draconian penalties imposed on street dealers were cutting into 
the drug trade. Holder admitted as much in his speech to the American 
Bar Association. "We cannot simply prosecute or incarcerate our way 
to becoming a safer nation."

Rather than attempting to dismantle the mandatory minimum sentences 
enacted by his predecessors - which would have taken years - Holder 
directed prosecutors to sidestep them by omitting details (the 
quantity of the illegal substance, for example) that would force 
judges to assign jail time. The result won't be instantaneous. Some 
hawkish prosecutors will ignore Washington's signal. Some judges will 
hold back, awaiting further details. But America's spare-no-cost 
campaign to stamp out narcotics is essentially over.

This leaves Harper in the lurch. After scrambling for six years to 
catch up with the U.S. he finds himself out of step with Washington 
again. His crime legislation, designed for the George Bush era, is an 
anachronism in the Barack Obama presidency.

Fortunately, Ottawa's sentencing laws aren't as harsh as the ones 
Washington is neutralizing. And they haven't been in force long 
enough to produce a massive expansion in jail-building or a dramatic 
increase in the prison population. But in terms of tone and 
direction, Harper is at marching in the opposite direction from his 
U.S. counterpart.

The Prime Minister is unlikely to do an about-face. The crime bill is 
one of the few concrete achievements he can claim in a term marred by 
pipeline woes, a sluggish economy, difficulty achieving a free trade 
deal with Europe and wrongdoing in the Senate.

But Holder's policy shift and the compelling case he made that 
widespread incarceration for non-violent drug crimes "is both 
ineffective and unsustainable" may induce Harper to temper his zeal 
for locking up young men lured into the drug trade. It could also 
embolden prosecutors to draw up charges in ways that don't lead to 
mandatory jail sentences. Looking ahead to the 2015 election, it will 
give both the Liberals and New Democrats solid ground on which build 
to platforms that emphasize rehabilitation, drug treatment and 
restitution, as opposed to ever more imprisonment.

The U.S. attorney general appealed to battle-weary Americans to help 
him build a more just society. Canadians know that phrase well. It's 
worth reviving.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom