Creating a sensible marijuana law

Creating a sensible marijuana law
By Lester Grinspoon
November 22, 2007


ALMOST HALF of American adults have tried marijuana, and the number of people who use it regularly has increased to about 15 million. This expanding use of marijuana can no longer be dismissed as simply a youthful fad that can be eliminated through the war on drugs.

Still, marijuana arrests account for nearly 44 percent of all drug arrests in the United States. According to the Uniform Crime Report, nearly 830,000 people were arrested in 2006 on marijuana charges, nearly a 15 percent increase over 2005. Nine out of 10 were arrested for mere possession.

Despite the increasing threat of arrest, the growing demands of employers for urine tests, and the ubiquity of the misinformation purveyed by the US government and the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, the number of Americans who experiment with or regularly use this substance continues to grow. So many people have discovered its remarkably limited toxicity and its versatility as a medicine that 12 states have now adopted legislation or initiatives that allow for its medicinal use and 12 states have decriminalized it by reducing penalties for possession of small quantities to a fine, with no arrest or jail penalty.

Massachusetts is considering decriminalizing minor marijuana offenses, with both proposed legislation and a proposed voter initiative. An out-of-state grouphas been collecting signatures for the voter initiative. Despite my agreement with the goal of eliminating criminal penalties for minor marijuana offenses, I oppose the initiative as it has been drafted.

The initiative reduces the penalty for possession of up to 1 ounce of marijuana to a fine of $100, but it actually establishes a new offense. The sponsors should withdraw it and replace it with a more thoughtfully worded version.

The new offense is internal possession of marijuana metabolites. Anyone discovered to have any of these metabolites in his body fluids or hair would be prosecutable.

However, like many other chemicals that are fat-soluble, these metabolites are excreted slowly, often long after their capacity to exert any psychoactive effect has disappeared. For example, an individual who has smoked marijuana on a Saturday night might have a positive urine test when she reports for work on Monday morning even though there is no evidence that she is "high."

If she has used it every night, in much the same way others have a daily alcoholic drink after work, her urine would test positive for at least a month after the last smoke. Currently no such offense exists under Massachusetts law; an individual today cannot be charged with any offense simply because he has inactive THC metabolites in his system. The existence of these metabolites in the body does not signify impairment; their presence simply establishes a history of having used marijuana in the past.

A second flaw in the initiative that should be corrected is the definition of marijuana as limited to cannabis sativa that contains no more than 2.5 percent THC, the primary active ingredient in marijuana.

Most marijuana ranges from 8 to 15 percent THC, and any initiative must redefine marijuana as the flowers and leaves of the cannabis sativa plant without THC limitation. Instead, the drafters of the initiative have responded to this inadequate definition of marijuana by drafting language that would decriminalize up to an ounce of the far more potent pure THC, perhaps an unintended result of trying to make the initiative compatible with the present statute.

Overall, the wording makes the initiative defective and vulnerable, a vulnerability that would surely be exploited by the drug warriors as they attempt to build opposition to this proposal should it eventually make the ballot.

So let's reject this fatally flawed proposal and work with the Legislature for a well-drafted law that would effectively decriminalize the possession and use of marijuana by adults in Massachusetts. If that doesn't happen by early 2009, another well-drafted initiative, one that would truly free adults to use this drug responsibly, would be in order.

Dr. Lester Grinspoon, an emeritus associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, is author of "Marijuana Reconsidered" and coauthor of "Marijuana, the Forbidden Medicine."

A Second Chance for Ex-Offenders

November 7, 2007
NYT Editorial

A Second Chance for Ex-Offenders

If past patterns hold true, more than half of the 650,000 prisoners released this year will be back behind bars by 2010. With the prison population exploding and the price of incarceration now topping $60 billion a year, states are rightly focusing on ways to reduce recidivism. Congress can give these efforts a boost by passing the Second Chance Act, which would provide crucial help to people who have paid their debts to society.

Newly released inmates are often driven right back to prison by difficulty in obtaining jobs, education and housing, as well as by the social stigma that comes from having been in prison. In addition, many of these people suffer from mental illnesses but have no access to treatment. Some states have begun offering assistance in these areas, but much more needs to be done.

The Second Chance Act would add to what the country knows about the re-entry process by establishing a federal re-entry task force, along with a national resource center to collect and disseminate information about proven programs.

The bill would broaden access to high-quality drug treatment, which is in scarce supply almost everywhere. It would also encourage states to work harder at reuniting families, which are often torn apart when a parent goes to prison.

The country worsened the recidivism crisis when it killed off many of the in-prison education programs that have a strong track record of helping released inmates live crime-free lives. The bill would begin to reverse that destructive trend by providing grants to improve academic and vocational education behind bars.

The programs necessary to help former prisoners find a place in society do not exist in most communities. The Second Chance Act would help to create those programs by providing money, training, technical assistance — and a Congressional stamp of approval.

Destruction in black America is self-inflicted

By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist September 5, 2007

DEBATING capital punishment at an Ivy League university a few years ago, I was confronted with the claim that since death sentences are more often meted out in cases where the victim is white, the death penalty must be racially biased. It's a spurious argument, I replied. Whites commit fewer than half of all murders in the United States, yet more whites than blacks are sentenced to death and more whites than blacks are executed each year. If there is racial bias in the system, it clearly isn't in favor of whites.

But if you choose to focus on the race of victims, I added, remember that nearly all black homicide is intraracial - more than nine out of 10 black murder victims in the United States are killed by black murderers. So applying the death penalty in more cases where the victim is black would mean sending more black men to death row.

After the debate, a young black woman accosted me indignantly. Ninety-plus percent of black blood is shed by black hands? What about all the victims of white supremacists? Hadn't I heard of lynching? Hadn't I heard of James Byrd, who died so horribly in Jasper, Texas? When I assured her that Byrd's murder by whites was utterly untypical of most black homicide, she was dubious.

I thought of that young woman when I read recently about James Ford Seale, the former Mississippi Klansman sentenced last month to three life terms in prison for his role in murdering two black teenagers 43 years ago. The killing of Charles Moore and Henry Dee in 1964 was one of several unsolved civil-rights-era crimes that prosecutors in the South have reopened in recent years. Seale's trial was a vivid reminder of the days when racial contempt was a deadly fact of life in much of the country. His sentence proclaims even more vividly the transformation of America since then. White racism, once such a murderous force, is now associated mostly with feeble has-beens.

Yet many Americans, like the woman at my debate, still seem to view racial questions through an antediluvian haze. To them, white bigotry remains a clear and present danger, and the reason so many black Americans die before their time.

But the data aren't in dispute. Though outrage over "racism" is ever fashionable, African-Americans have long had far less to fear from the violence of racist whites than from the mayhem of the black underclass.

"Do you realize that the leading killer of young black males is young black males?" asked Secretary of Health and Human Services Louis Sullivan 16 years ago. "As a black man and a father of three, this really shakes me to the core of my being."

From Georgia Congressman John Lewis, a veteran of the civil rights movement, came a similar cry of anguish. "Nothing in the long history of blacks in America," he lamented in 1994, "suggests the terrible destruction blacks are visiting upon each other today."

Happily, crime rates have declined from their 1990s peak. But it remains that the worst destruction in black America is self-inflicted.

In a new study, the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics confirms once again that almost half the people murdered in the United States each year are black, and 93 percent of black homicide victims are killed by someone of their own race. (For white homicide victims, the figure is 85 percent.) In other words, of the estimated 8,000 African-Americans murdered in 2005, more than 7,400 were cut down by other African-Americans. Though blacks account for just one-eighth of the US population, the BJS reports, they are six times more likely than whites to be victimized by homicide -- and seven times more likely to commit homicide.

Such huge disproportions don't just happen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously warned 40 years ago that the collapse of black family life would mean rising chaos and crime in the black community. Today, as many as 70 percent of black children are born out of wedlock and 60 percent are raised in fatherless households. And as reams of research confirm, children raised without married parents and intact, stable families are more likely to engage in antisocial behavior.

High rates of black violent crime are a national tragedy, but it is the law-abiding black majority that suffers from them most. "There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life," Jesse Jackson said in 1993, "than to walk down the street and hear footsteps . . . Then turn around and see somebody white and feel relieved."

It isn't an insoluble problem. Americans overcame white racism; they can overcome black crime. But the first step, as always, is to face the facts.

Jeff Jacoby's e-mail address is jacoby@globe.com.

Jailing Juveniles

Children should not be held in adult jails.

Friday, August 10, 2007 - Washington Post

MORE CHILDREN are going to jail -- too often even before they have been convicted.

In the District, the average daily count of juveniles being held in adult jail before trial has nearly tripled in the past year, according to a recent report from the Campaign for Youth Justice. It's unclear whether this rise is attributable to an increase in serious crimes by juveniles, a surge in police patrols or tougher decisions by prosecutors who choose when to try teenagers as adults. Whatever the cause, the increase in children held in adult jails should be reversed as a matter of public safety and decency.

Studies have shown that children incarcerated in adult jails are more likely to be arrested again and to commit graver new offenses. In the D.C. Jail, which holds inmates awaiting trial or serving short sentences, juveniles are kept apart from adults, but they benefit from little of the rehabilitative programming and structure required at juvenile detention centers. Currently, only those needing special education, for example, can go to class. Devon Brown, director of the D.C. Department of Corrections, said the agency has negotiated with the D.C. public school system to begin providing classes for all juveniles at the D.C Jail starting on Oct. 1. These efforts are laudable, but, as Mr. Brown agrees, an adult jail does not have the resources, staffing or training to treat these youths.

Children are developmentally different from adults. Neurological research, including a study presented before the 2005 Supreme Court decision striking down capital punishment for juveniles, has shown that the parts of the brain that manage moral reasoning and impulse control do not fully develop until a person reaches his or her early to mid 20s. Experts agree that teenagers who've gotten themselves into trouble need structure, counseling and directed programming. Troubled youths should not be allowed -- as they currently are at the D.C. Jail -- to spend most of their days sleeping.

The Federal Bureau of Prisons knows this. In the District, juveniles who are tried as adults and convicted and sentenced to prison time of more than six months are turned over to the Bureau of Prisons for incarceration. But even though they were held in adult jails before trial, the agency is legally barred from keeping them in adult prisons after conviction, according to bureau spokeswoman Traci Billingsley. Instead, they must be transferred to juvenile facilities, where they remain until age 18.

Surely this law exists because exposing troubled children to less structured and more dangerous adult jails can only harden them and lead to more crime, more arrests and more expensive imprisonment. Jailing juveniles in adult facilities is a bad investment of public funds and an investment in worse fortroubled American youths.

Why Are So Many Americans in Prison?

Race and the transformation of criminal justice
By Glenn C. Loury

The early 1990s were the age of drive-by shootings, drug deals gone bad, crack cocaine, and gangsta rap. Between 1960 and 1990, the annual number of murders in New Haven rose from six to 31, the number of rapes from four to 168, the number of robberies from 16 to 1,784—all this while the city’s population declined by 14 percent. Crime was concentrated in central cities: in 1990, two fifths of Pennsylvania’s violent crimes were committed in Philadelphia, home to one seventh of the state’s population. The subject of crime dominated American domestic-policy debates.

Most observers at the time expected things to get worse. Consulting demographic tables and extrapolating trends, scholars and pundits warned the public to prepare for an onslaught, and for a new kind of criminal—the anomic, vicious, irreligious, amoral juvenile “super-predator.” In 1996, one academic commentator predicted a “bloodbath” of juvenile homicides in 2005.

And so we prepared. Stoked by fear and political opportunism, but also by the need to address a very real social problem, we threw lots of people in jail, and when the old prisons were filled we built new ones.

But the onslaught never came. Crime rates peaked in 1992 and have dropped sharply since. Even as crime rates fell, however, imprisonment rates remained high and continued their upward march. The result, the current American prison system, is a leviathan unmatched in human history.

According to a 2005 report of the International Centre for Prison Studies in London, the United States—with five percent of the world’s population—houses 25 percent of the world’s inmates. Our incarceration rate (714 per 100,000 residents) is almost 40 percent greater than those of our nearest competitors (the Bahamas, Belarus, and Russia). Other industrial democracies, even those with significant crime problems of their own, are much less punitive: our incarceration rate is 6.2 times that of Canada, 7.8 times that of France, and 12.3 times that of Japan. We have a corrections sector that employs more Americans than the combined work forces of General Motors, Ford, and Wal-Mart, the three largest corporate employers in the country, and we are spending some $200 billion annually on law enforcement and corrections at all levels of government, a fourfold increase (in constant dollars) over the past quarter century.

Never before has a supposedly free country denied basic liberty to so many of its citizens. In December 2006, some 2.25 million persons were being held in the nearly 5,000 prisons and jails that are scattered across America’s urban and rural landscapes. One third of inmates in state prisons are violent criminals, convicted of homicide, rape, or robbery. But the other two thirds consist mainly of property and drug offenders. Inmates are disproportionately drawn from the most disadvantaged parts of society. On average, state inmates have fewer than 11 years of schooling. They are also vastly disproportionately black and brown.

How did it come to this? One argument is that the massive increase in incarceration reflects the success of a rational public policy: faced with a compelling social problem, we responded by imprisoning people and succeeded in lowering crime rates. This argument is not entirely misguided. Increased incarceration does appear to have reduced crime somewhat. But by how much? Estimates of the share of the 1990s reduction in violent crime that can be attributed to the prison boom range from five percent to 25 percent. Whatever the number, analysts of all political stripes now agree that we have long ago entered the zone of diminishing returns. The conservative scholar John DiIulio, who coined the term “super-predator” in the early 1990s, was by the end of that decade declaring in The Wall Street Journal that “Two Million Prisoners Are Enough.” But there was no political movement for getting America out of the mass-incarceration business. The throttle was stuck.

A more convincing argument is that imprisonment rates have continued to rise while crime rates have fallen because we have become progressively more punitive: not because crime has continued to explode (it hasn’t), not because we made a smart policy choice, but because we have made a collective decision to increase the rate of punishment.

One simple measure of punitiveness is the likelihood that a person who is arrested will be subsequently incarcerated. Between 1980 and 2001, there was no real change in the chances of being arrested in response to a complaint: the rate was just under 50 percent. But the likelihood that an arrest would result in imprisonment more than doubled, from 13 to 28 percent. And because the amount of time served and the rate of prison admission both increased, the incarceration rate for violent crime almost tripled, despite the decline in the level of violence. The incarceration rate for nonviolent and drug offenses increased at an even faster pace: between 1980 and 1997 the number of people incarcerated for nonviolent offenses tripled, and the number of people incarcerated for drug offenses increased by a factor of 11. Indeed, the criminal-justice researcher Alfred Blumstein has argued that none of the growth in incarceration between 1980 and 1996 can be attributed to more crime:

The growth was entirely attributable to a growth in punitiveness, about equally to growth in prison commitments per arrest (an indication of tougher prosecution or judicial sentencing) and to longer time served (an indication of longer sentences, elimination of parole or later parole release, or greater readiness to recommit parolees to prison for either technical violations or new crimes).
This growth in punitiveness was accompanied by a shift in thinking about the basic purpose of criminal justice. In the 1970s, the sociologist David Garland argues, the corrections system was commonly seen as a way to prepare offenders to rejoin society. Since then, the focus has shifted from rehabilitation to punishment and stayed there. Felons are no longer persons to be supported, but risks to be dealt with. And the way to deal with the risks is to keep them locked up. As of 2000, 33 states had abolished limited parole (up from 17 in 1980); 24 states had introduced three-strikes laws (up from zero); and 40 states had introduced truth-in-sentencing laws (up from three). The vast majority of these changes occurred in the 1990s, as crime rates fell.

This new system of punitive ideas is aided by a new relationship between the media, the politicians, and the public. A handful of cases—in which a predator does an awful thing to an innocent—get excessive media attention and engender public outrage. This attention typically bears no relation to the frequency of the particular type of crime, and yet laws—such as three-strikes laws that give mandatory life sentences to nonviolent drug offenders—and political careers are made on the basis of the public’s reaction to the media coverage of such crimes.

* * *

Despite a sharp national decline in crime, American criminal justice has become crueler and less caring than it has been at any other time in our modern history. Why?

The question has no simple answer, but the racial composition of prisons is a good place to start. The punitive turn in the nation’s social policy—intimately connected with public rhetoric about responsibility, dependency, social hygiene, and the reclamation of public order—can be fully grasped only when viewed against the backdrop of America’s often ugly and violent racial history: there is a reason why our inclination toward forgiveness and the extension of a second chance to those who have violated our behavioral strictures is so stunted, and why our mainstream political discourses are so bereft of self-examination and searching social criticism. This historical resonance between the stigma of race and the stigma of imprisonment serves to keep alive in our public culture the subordinating social meanings that have always been associated with blackness. Race helps to explain why the United States is exceptional among the democratic industrial societies in the severity and extent of its punitive policy and in the paucity of its social-welfare institutions.

Slavery ended a long time ago, but the institution of chattel slavery and the ideology of racial subordination that accompanied it have cast a long shadow. I speak here of the history of lynching throughout the country; the racially biased policing and judging in the South under Jim Crow and in the cities of the Northeast, Midwest, and West to which blacks migrated after the First and Second World Wars; and the history of racial apartheid that ended only as a matter of law with the civil-rights movement. It should come as no surprise that in the post–civil rights era, race, far from being peripheral, has been central to the evolution of American social policy.

The political scientist Vesla Mae Weaver, in a recently completed dissertation, examines policy history, public opinion, and media processes in an attempt to understand the role of race in this historic transformation of criminal justice. She argues—persuasively, I think—that the punitive turn represented a political response to the success of the civil-rights movement. Weaver describes a process of “frontlash” in which opponents of the civil-rights revolution sought to regain the upper hand by shifting to a new issue. Rather than reacting directly to civil-rights developments, and thus continuing to fight a battle they had lost, those opponents—consider George Wallace’s campaigns for the presidency, which drew so much support in states like Michigan and Wisconsin—shifted attention to a seemingly race-neutral concern over crime:

Once the clutch of Jim Crow had loosened, opponents of civil rights shifted the “locus of attack” by injecting crime onto the agenda. Through the process of frontlash, rivals of civil rights progress defined racial discord as criminal and argued that crime legislation would be a panacea to racial unrest. This strategy both imbued crime with race and depoliticized racial struggle, a formula which foreclosed earlier “root causes” alternatives. Fusing anxiety about crime to anxiety over racial change and riots, civil rights and racial disorder—initially defined as a problem of minority disenfranchisement—were defined as a crime problem, which helped shift debate from social reform to punishment.
Of course, this argument (for which Weaver adduces considerable circumstantial evidence) is speculative. But something interesting seems to have been going on in the late 1960s regarding the relationship between attitudes on race and social policy.

Before 1965, public attitudes on the welfare state and on race, as measured by the annually administered General Social Survey, varied year to year independently of one another: you could not predict much about a person’s attitudes on welfare politics by knowing their attitudes about race. After 1965, the attitudes moved in tandem, as welfare came to be seen as a race issue. Indeed, the year-to-year correlation between an index measuring liberalism of racial attitudes and attitudes toward the welfare state over the interval 1950–1965 was .03. These same two series had a correlation of .68 over the period 1966–1996. The association in the American mind of race with welfare, and of race with crime, has been achieved at a common historical moment. Crime-control institutions are part of a larger social-policy complex—they relate to and interact with the labor market, family-welfare efforts, and health and social-work activities. Indeed, Garland argues that the ideological approaches to welfare and crime control have marched rightward to a common beat: “The institutional and cultural changes that have occurred in the crime control field are analogous to those that have occurred in the welfare state more generally.” Just as the welfare state came to be seen as a race issue, so, too, crime came to be seen as a race issue, and policies have been shaped by this perception.

Consider the tortured racial history of the War on Drugs. Blacks were twice as likely as whites to be arrested for a drug offense in 1975 but four times as likely by 1989. Throughout the 1990s, drug-arrest rates remained at historically unprecedented levels. Yet according to the National Survey on Drug Abuse, drug use among adults fell from 20 percent in 1979 to 11 percent in 2000. A similar trend occurred among adolescents. In the age groups 12–17 and 18–25, use of marijuana, cocaine, and heroin all peaked in the late 1970s and began a steady decline thereafter. Thus, a decline in drug use across the board had begun a decade before the draconian anti-drug efforts of the 1990s were initiated.

Of course, most drug arrests are for trafficking, not possession, so usage rates and arrest rates needn’t be expected to be identical. Still, we do well to bear in mind that the social problem of illicit drug use is endemic to our whole society. Significantly, throughout the period 1979–2000, white high-school seniors reported using drugs at a significantly higher rate than black high-school seniors. High drug-usage rates in white, middle-class American communities in the early 1980s accounts for the urgency many citizens felt to mount a national attack on the problem. But how successful has the effort been, and at what cost?

Think of the cost this way: to save middle-class kids from the threat of a drug epidemic that might not have even existed by the time that drug incarceration began its rapid increase in the 1980s, we criminalized underclass kids. Arrests went up, but drug prices have fallen sharply over the past 20 years—suggesting that the ratcheting up of enforcement has not made drugs harder to get on the street. The strategy clearly wasn’t keeping drugs away from those who sought them. Not only are prices down, but the data show that drug-related visits to emergency rooms also rose steadily throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

An interesting case in point is New York City. Analyzing arrests by residential neighborhood and police precinct, the criminologist Jeffrey Fagan and his colleagues Valerie West and Jan Holland found that incarceration was highest in the city’s poorest neighborhoods, though these were often not the neighborhoods in which crime rates were the highest. Moreover, they discovered a perverse effect of incarceration on crime: higher incarceration in a given neighborhood in one year seemed to predict higher crime rates in that same neighborhood one year later. This growth and persistence of incarceration over time, the authors concluded, was due primarily to the drug enforcement practices of police and to sentencing laws that require imprisonment for repeat felons. Police scrutiny was more intensive and less forgiving in high-incarceration neighborhoods, and parolees returning to such neighborhoods were more closely monitored. Thus, discretionary and spatially discriminatory police behavior led to a high and increasing rate of repeat prison admissions in the designated neighborhoods, even as crime rates fell.

Fagan, West, and Holland explain the effects of spatially concentrated urban anti-drug-law enforcement in the contemporary American metropolis. Buyers may come from any neighborhood and any social stratum. But the sellers—at least the ones who can be readily found hawking their wares on street corners and in public vestibules—come predominantly from the poorest, most non-white parts of the city. The police, with arrest quotas to meet, know precisely where to find them. The researchers conclude:

Incarceration begets more incarceration, and incarceration also begets more crime, which in turn invites more aggressive enforcement, which then re-supplies incarceration . . . three mechanisms . . . contribute to and reinforce incarceration in neighborhoods: the declining economic fortunes of former inmates and the effects on neighborhoods where they tend to reside, resource and relationship strains on families of prisoners that weaken the family’s ability to supervise children, and voter disenfranchisement that weakens the political economy of neighborhoods.

The effects of imprisonment on life chances are profound. For incarcerated black men, hourly wages are ten percent lower after prison than before. For all incarcerated men, the number of weeks worked per year falls by at least a third after their release.

So consider the nearly 60 percent of black male high-school dropouts born in the late 1960s who are imprisoned before their 40th year. While locked up, these felons are stigmatized—they are regarded as fit subjects for shaming. Their links to family are disrupted; their opportunities for work are diminished; their voting rights may be permanently revoked. They suffer civic excommunication. Our zeal for social discipline consigns these men to a permanent nether caste. And yet, since these men—whatever their shortcomings—have emotional and sexual and family needs, including the need to be fathers and lovers and husbands, we are creating a situation where the children of this nether caste are likely to join a new generation of untouchables. This cycle will continue so long as incarceration is viewed as the primary path to social hygiene.

* * *

I have been exploring the issue of causes: of why we took the punitive turn that has resulted in mass incarceration. But even if the racial argument about causes is inconclusive, the racial consequences are clear. To be sure, in the United States, as in any society, public order is maintained by the threat and use of force. We enjoy our good lives only because we are shielded by the forces of law and order, which keep the unruly at bay. Yet in this society, to a degree virtually unmatched in any other, those bearing the brunt of order enforcement belong in vastly disproportionate numbers to historically marginalized racial groups. Crime and punishment in America has a color.

In his fine study Punishment and Inequality in America (2006), the Princeton University sociologist Bruce Western powerfully describes the scope, nature, and consequences of contemporary imprisonment. He finds that the extent of racial disparity in imprisonment rates is greater than in any other major arena of American social life: at eight to one, the black–white ratio of incarceration rates dwarfs the two-to-one ratio of unemployment rates, the three-to-one ration of non-marital childbearing, the two-to-one ratio of infant-mortality rates and one-to-five ratio of net worth. While three out of 200 young whites were incarcerated in 2000, the rate for young blacks was one in nine. A black male resident of the state of California is more likely to go to a state prison than a state college.

The scandalous truth is that the police and penal apparatus are now the primary contact between adult black American men and the American state. Among black male high-school dropouts aged 20 to 40, a third were locked up on any given day in 2000, fewer than three percent belonged to a union, and less than one quarter were enrolled in any kind of social program. Coercion is the most salient meaning of government for these young men. Western estimates that nearly 60 percent of black male dropouts born between 1965 and 1969 were sent to prison on a felony conviction at least once before they reached the age of 35.

One cannot reckon the world-historic American prison build-up over the past 35 years without calculating the enormous costs imposed upon the persons imprisoned, their families, and their communities. (Of course, this has not stopped many social scientists from pronouncing on the net benefits of incarceration without doing so.) Deciding on the weight to give to a “thug’s” well-being—or to that of his wife or daughter or son—is a question of social morality, not social science. Nor can social science tell us how much additional cost borne by the offending class is justified in order to obtain a given increment of security or property or peace of mind for the rest of us. These are questions about the nature of the American state and its relationship to its people that transcend the categories of benefits and costs.

Yet the discourse surrounding punishment policy invariably discounts the humanity of the thieves, drug sellers, prostitutes, rapists, and, yes, those whom we put to death. It gives insufficient weight to the welfare, to the humanity, of those who are knitted together with offenders in webs of social and psychic affiliation. What is more, institutional arrangements for dealing with criminal offenders in the United States have evolved to serve expressive as well as instrumental ends. We have wanted to “send a message,” and we have done so with a vengeance. In the process, we have created facts. We have answered the question, who is to blame for the domestic maladies that beset us? We have constructed a national narrative. We have created scapegoats, indulged our need to feel virtuous, and assuaged our fears. We have met the enemy, and the enemy is them.

Incarceration keeps them away from us. Thus Garland: “The prison is used today as a kind of reservation, a quarantine zone in which purportedly dangerous individuals are segregated in the name of public safety.” The boundary between prison and community, Garland continues, is “heavily patrolled and carefully monitored to prevent risks leaking out from one to the other. Those offenders who are released ‘into the community’ are subject to much tighter control than previously, and frequently find themselves returned to custody for failure to comply with the conditions that continue to restrict their freedom. For many of these parolees and ex-convicts, the ‘community’ into which they are released is actually a closely monitored terrain, a supervised space, lacking much of the liberty that one associates with ‘normal life’.”

Deciding how citizens of varied social rank within a common polity ought to relate to one another is a more fundamental consideration than deciding which crime-control policy is most efficient. The question of relationship, of solidarity, of who belongs to the body politic and who deserves exclusion—these are philosophical concerns of the highest order. A decent society will on occasion resist the efficient course of action, for the simple reason that to follow it would be to act as though we were not the people we have determined ourselves to be: a people conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that we all are created equal. Assessing the propriety of creating a racially defined pariah class in the middle of our great cities at the start of the 21st century presents us with just such a case.

My recitation of the brutal facts about punishment in today’s America may sound to some like a primal scream at this monstrous social machine that is grinding poor black communities to dust. And I confess that these brutal facts do at times incline me to cry out in despair. But my argument is analytical, not existential. Its principal thesis is this: we law-abiding, middle-class Americans have made decisions about social policy and incarceration, and we benefit from those decisions, and that means from a system of suffering, rooted in state violence, meted out at our request. We had choices and we decided to be more punitive. Our society—the society we have made—creates criminogenic conditions in our sprawling urban ghettos, and then acts out rituals of punishment against them as some awful form of human sacrifice.

This situation raises a moral problem that we cannot avoid. We cannot pretend that there are more important problems in our society, or that this circumstance is the necessary solution to other, more pressing problems—unless we are also prepared to say that we have turned our backs on the ideal of equality for all citizens and abandoned the principles of justice. We ought to ask ourselves two questions: Just what manner of people are we Americans? And in light of this, what are our obligations to our fellow citizens—even those who break our laws?

* * *

To address these questions, we need to think about the evaluation of our prison system as a problem in the theory of distributive justice—not the purely procedural idea of ensuring equal treatment before the law and thereafter letting the chips fall where they may, but the rather more demanding ideal of substantive racial justice. The goal is to bring about through conventional social policy and far-reaching institutional reforms a situation in which the history of racial oppression is no longer so evident in the disparate life experiences of those who descend from slaves.

And I suggest we approach that problem from the perspective of John Rawls’s theory of justice: first, that we think about justice from an “original position” behind a “veil of ignorance” that obstructs from view our own situation, including our class, race, gender, and talents. We need to ask what rules we would pick if we seriously imagined that we could turn out to be anyone in the society. Second, following Rawls’s “difference principle,” we should permit inequalities only if they work to improve the circumstances of the least advantaged members of society. But here, the object of moral inquiry is not the distribution among individuals of wealth and income, but instead the distribution of a negative good, punishment, among individuals and, importantly, racial groups.

So put yourself in John Rawls’s original position and imagine that you could occupy any rank in the social hierarchy. Let me be more concrete: imagine that you could be born a black American male outcast shuffling between prison and the labor market on his way to an early death to the chorus of nigger or criminal or dummy. Suppose we had to stop thinking of us and them. What social rules would we pick if we actually thought that they could be us? I expect that we would still pick some set of punishment institutions to contain bad behavior and protect society. But wouldn’t we pick arrangements that respected the humanity of each individual and of those they are connected to through bonds of social and psychic affiliation? If any one of us had a real chance of being one of those faces looking up from the bottom of the well—of being the least among us—then how would we talk publicly about those who break our laws? What would we do with juveniles who go awry, who roam the streets with guns and sometimes commit acts of violence? What weight would we give to various elements in the deterrence-retribution-incapacitation-rehabilitation calculus, if we thought that calculus could end up being applied to our own children, or to us? How would we apportion blame and affix responsibility for the cultural and social pathologies evident in some quarters of our society if we envisioned that we ourselves might well have been born into the social margins where such pathology flourishes?

If we take these questions as seriously as we should, then we would, I expect, reject a pure ethic of personal responsibility as the basis for distributing punishment. Issues about responsibility are complex, and involve a kind of division of labor—what John Rawls called a “social division of responsibility” between “citizens as a collective body” and individuals: when we hold a person responsible for his or her conduct—by establishing laws, investing in their enforcement, and consigning some persons to prisons—we need also to think about whether we have done our share in ensuring that each person faces a decent set of opportunities for a good life. We need to ask whether we as a society have fulfilled our collective responsibility to ensure fair conditions for each person—for each life that might turn out to be our life.

We would, in short, recognize a kind of social responsibility, even for the wrongful acts freely chosen by individual persons. I am not arguing that people commit crimes because they have no choices, and that in this sense the “root causes” of crime are social; individuals always have choices. My point is that responsibility is a matter of ethics, not social science. Society at large is implicated in an individual person’s choices because we have acquiesced in—perhaps actively supported, through our taxes and votes, words and deeds—social arrangements that work to our benefit and his detriment, and which shape his consciousness and sense of identity in such a way that the choices he makes, which we may condemn, are nevertheless compelling to him—an entirely understandable response to circumstance. Closed and bounded social structures—like racially homogeneous urban ghettos—create contexts where “pathological” and “dysfunctional” cultural forms emerge; but these forms are neither intrinsic to the people caught in these structures nor independent of the behavior of people who stand outside them.

Thus, a central reality of our time is the fact that there has opened a wide racial gap in the acquisition of cognitive skills, the extent of law-abidingness, the stability of family relations, the attachment to the work force, and the like. This disparity in human development is, as a historical matter, rooted in political, economic, social, and cultural factors peculiar to this society and reflective of its unlovely racial history: it is a societal, not communal or personal, achievement. At the level of the individual case we must, of course, act as if this were not so. There could be no law, no civilization, without the imputation to particular persons of responsibility for their wrongful acts. But the sum of a million cases, each one rightly judged on its merits to be individually fair, may nevertheless constitute a great historic wrong. The state does not only deal with individual cases. It also makes policies in the aggregate, and the consequences of these policies are more or less knowable. And who can honestly say—who can look in the mirror and say with a straight face—that we now have laws and policies that we would endorse if we did not know our own situation and genuinely considered the possibility that we might be the least advantaged?

Even if the current racial disparity in punishment in our country gave evidence of no overt racial discrimination—and, perhaps needless to say, I view that as a wildly optimistic supposition—it would still be true that powerful forces are at work to perpetuate the consequences of a universally acknowledged wrongful past. This is in the first instance a matter of interpretation—of the narrative overlay that we impose upon the facts.

The tacit association in the American public’s imagination of “blackness” with “unworthiness” or “dangerousness” has obscured a fundamental ethical point about responsibility, both collective and individual, and promoted essentialist causal misattributions: when confronted by the facts of racially disparate achievement, racially disproportionate crime rates, and racially unequal school achievement, observers will have difficulty identifying with the plight of a group of people whom they (mistakenly) think are simply “reaping what they have sown.” Thus, the enormous racial disparity in the imposition of social exclusion, civic ex-communication, and lifelong disgrace has come to seem legitimate, even necessary: we fail to see how our failures as a collective body are implicated in this disparity. We shift all the responsibility onto their shoulders, only by irresponsibly—indeed, immorally—denying our own. And yet, this entire dynamic has its roots in past unjust acts that were perpetrated on the basis of race.

Given our history, producing a racially defined nether caste through the ostensibly neutral application of law should be profoundly offensive to our ethical sensibilities—to the principles we proudly assert as our own. Mass incarceration has now become a principal vehicle for the reproduction of racial hierarchy in our society. Our country’s policymakers need to do something about it. And all of us are ultimately responsible for making sure that they do.

Glenn C. Loury is the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences in the department of economics at Brown University. He is the author of The Anatomy of Racial Inequality, and he was a 2002 Carnegie Scholar.

Originally published in the July/August 2007 issue of Boston Review.

Source URL: http://bostonreview.net:80/BR32.4/loury.html.

Pardon Whom?

Pardon Whom?

KATHA POLLITT

Dear George W. Bush,

I know you're getting a lot of flak for commuting Scooter Libby's sentence, but I say, Stick to your guns. The man has definitely suffered enough, what with everyone making fun of his nickname and comparing him to Paris Hilton. Besides, as you pointed out, Libby's reputation has been "forever damaged" and what is a public servant without his reputation? He'll have to join that other neocon convict Elliott Abrams, whom your dad pardoned in 1992, in sweeping the floors at Denny's. Oh, I forgot. Abrams isn't pushing a broom, he's your deputy national security adviser. I guess reputation isn't all it used to be, and if David Brooks can't figure out how to blame that on liberals, feminism and divorce he's not the man I take him for.

Now that you're taking up compassion-- Libby has young children, you reminded the heartless Democrats--you' ll find that he isn't the only convict who could use a helping hand.

It's too late for the 152 men and one woman you sent to the death chamber when you were governor of Texas, but not for the staggering number of people doing federal time as part of the misguided, destructive and futile "war on drugs."

Did you know that roughly 1,600 people are arrested every day for marijuana? As a former alcoholic you have to admit it's ridiculous to come down like a ton of bricks on the inoffensive herb while liquor floods the land, causing thousands of deaths each year. And did you know that possession of one gram of crack still commands the same sentence as 100 grams of cocaine, even though there's little difference between these substances?

According to the Sentencing Project, as of this year, 97,597 people were serving time in federal prisons for drug offenses. Add to that the roughly 250,000 in state prisons and you have one reason the United States has 2.2 million people in prison--more than any other country. (You also have the main reason that rates of incarceration for women have skyrocketed- - and let's not forget that two-thirds of them are mothers, many of them single mothers, with children just as cute as the Libby kids.)

The vast majority of drug offenders are not "kingpins"-- how many kingpins could there be? They're small-time dealers, often addicts themselves, or even those dealers' relatives or girlfriends, people who were so low down in the food chain they couldn't make a bargain with prosecutors, like those scruffy street people are always doing on Law & Order. People like Sharvonne McKinnon, mother of two, serving twenty years for minor involvement in her boyfriend's drug business, or Lidia Ramos, serving a ten-year minimum term for driving her boyfriend's car a few blocks; unbeknownst to herself, she says, it had ten kilograms of cocaine in the trunk and the destination was a drug deal. Foolish, yes. Guilty? A jury thought so. A jury thought Libby was guilty, too. You don't think compassionate conservatism means compassion just for conservatives, do you?

At the website of Families Against Mandatory Minimums (http://www.famm.org/) , you can read more about these prisoners and others like them--some of them ordinary poor people trapped where youthful folly collides with draconian laws, people not so different from the younger members of your own extended family, except for the "poor" and "laws" part. Others are middle-class, like Richard Paey, currently serving a twenty-five- year mandatory minimum sentence on charges stemming from his need for pain medication after a serious back injury. Maybe you could ask Rush Limbaugh about that one!

But perhaps you are looking for one big compassionate gesture that would help a lot of people all at once and not require asking your friends and relatives embarrassing questions.

With one stroke of your pen, you could pardon 200,000 young people. These are the youths who have fallen afoul of the drug provision of the 1998 Higher Education Act, which bars federal student aid to anyone convicted of a state or federal drug offense. That includes everything from government scholarships to work-study jobs. Unlike Libby, a middle-aged high- powered lawyer of considerable worldliness and wealth, these are just teenagers, who are famous for being idiots, and they violated laws that are broken every day by millions of normal, upstanding, productive citizens, including many Republicans. I don't think that can be said of lying to the FBI. Most people, even most Republicans, take that one pretty seriously.

Also unlike Libby, these offenders have already paid their debt to society. Now they are dropping out of college, or not going--unless, of course, their parents can afford to pay full freight. Talk about unintended consequences- -a law meant to warn kids away from drugs ends up keeping them out of college, but only if they're poor. You always say no child should be left behind. Pardon them, and people might begin to believe you actually mean it.

But why stop there--why not go all the way? Like Nixon going to China, you, the unofficial head of the religious right, could compassionately, conservatively begin commuting the whole mess that is the "war on drugs." It's been going on for decades, and what have we got to show for it? A bloated prison system, destroyed families, fractured communities, especially black communities.

Mass incarceration of black men has fueled nearly every problem the black community has--unemployment, gangs, violence, guns, the educational achievement gap, the absence of men from the lives of their children, HIV, hopelessness. Meanwhile, drugs are as widely available as ever, and millions of people still like to use them. As the most unpopular President in history--your approval rating is down to 29 percent, according to the latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll--what have you got to lose? Why not go down in history as the leader who admitted that America made a colossal mistake?

Think of it as a warm-up for acknowledging that other disastrous war--the one Libby helped you start in Iraq.

Just say yes!

Katha

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070730/pollitt

Prison AIDS Prevention Programs

OPINION - July 18, 2007 - NY Times

Editorial: Fighting AIDS Behind Bars

Public health officials now recognize that condom-distribution programs are integral to any meaningful AIDS prevention program.

Juvenile Justice

July 12, 2007
EDITORIAL

Juvenile Justice

One of Congress's most crucial tasks will be to strengthen and update the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act. Passed in 1974, the law required the states to move away from the practice of locking up truants and runaways — and to refrain from placing children in adult jails — in exchange for federal grant dollars.

Congress's goal then was to move the states away from failed policies that often turned young delinquents into hardened criminals and toward a framework based more on mentoring and rehabilitation. But the states have increasingly classified ever larger numbers of young offenders as adults, trying them in adult courts and holding them in adult prisons.

The damage wrought by these policies is vividly outlined in a federally backed study issued this spring. It reports that children handled in adult courts and confined in adult jails committed more violent crime than children processed through the traditional juvenile justice system. Other studies show that as many as half of the juvenile offenders sent to adult courts were not convicted there — or were sent back to the juvenile system, but often after spending time in adult lockups. Equally disturbing is the fact that youths of color are more likely to be sent to adult prisons than their white counterparts.

Reauthorization hearings begin today and members need to listen closely to what the experts are saying. Trying children as adults — except in isolated cases involving extreme violence — is both inhumane and counterproductive.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/12/opinion/12thu3.html?

For-Profit Prisons: The Postmodern Plantation?

June 1, 2007

For-Profit Prisons: The Postmodern Plantation?
By Nicole D. Sconiers

Prisons thus perform a feat of magic … But prisons do not disappear Problems, they disappear human beings. And the practice of disappearing vast numbers of people from poor, immigrant, and racially marginalized communities has literally become big business. -- Angela Davis, "Reflections on the Prison Industrial Complex"

Braving rush hour traffic and an overly friendly homeless man on the Sidewalk, I finally arrived at the small storefront in South Los Angeles. Critical Resistance, a grassroots organization committed to Abolishing the prison industrial complex (PIC), was in the midst of Their No New Jails meeting. I tiptoed into the room, feeling like a Narc in my Ann Taylor outfit and Coach bag. The issue being debated By this motley gathering of black, white and Latino activists was AB900, a $7.8 billion reform plan Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger recently Signed into law. The program would create 53,000 new beds in state Prisons and county jails, and some 8,000 inmates would be shipped to Private facilities out of state.

Prior to attending the No New Jails meeting, I compiled my own Dummies Guide to the Prison Industrial Complex. I had a few cousins Behind bars, but my knowledge of the penal system was embarrassingly Limited to 'hood movies and rhetoric spouted by radical intellectuals At open mics. I had to remove my Valley Girl blinders. I needed to Understand why the PIC was branded by many as a postmodern Plantation, and why minorities are viewed as its cash crop.

The prison industrial complex is a group of organizations that act as subcontractors for prisons, such as construction companies, prison Guard unions and surveillance technology vendors. According to The Sentencing Project, the '80s ushered in a new era of prison Privatization. The War on Drugs and tough sentencing laws, like Mandatory minimums and "Three Strikes," saw prison growth skyrocket, Making it difficult to maintain on the local, state and federal Levels. In response to this overcrowding, private investors hopped on The expansion bandwagon with a fervor that would make Starbucks Proud. Private-sector involvement moved from food prep and inmate Transportation to contracts for the management and operation of Entire prisons.

Opponents of the PIC argue that it criminalizes poor and minority Communities and emphasizes profits over rehabilitation. They feel That blacks and Latinos are overly policed to comply with tough-on-Crime legislation, therefore providing "raw material" for already Bulging prisons. Once in the Big House, inmates become a source of Cheap labor, doing data entry, garment and furniture manufacturing,
Contract packaging and telemarketing.

"In order to justify something like this, you have to dehumanize Populations," says Austin Delgadillo, lead organizer for the Los Angeles chapter of Critical Resistance. "A lot of the harms that Happen, or the different ways that people struggle to survive that Might not always be legal, push people into the PIC. The PIC is not Really doing anything to help people deal with these issues. It's not
Addressing the root problems of poverty and racism, so it just Becomes this cycle of dehumanization."

It's hard to ignore the racial dimension of the prison populace. By Year-end 2005, there were 2,193,798 people in U.S. Prisons and jails, According to Bureau Justice Statistics, and California currently Houses 173,000 inmates. Blacks have the highest incarceration rates Of any other group. In the Sunshine State alone, African-American men Were jailed at a rate of 5,125 per 100,000 in 2005, compared to 1,142 For Latinos, 770 for whites, and 474 for men of other races. Although Black women have much lower incarceration rates, they are four times As likely to be on lockdown as white women and Latinas. Among African-American women, 346 per 100,000 were behind bars in 2005, whereas Fewer than 80 women per 100,000 are incarcerated among whites, Latinas and other groups.

"It's a modern-day slavery system," says Kemba Smith, an activist, Aspiring lawyer, and former inmate #26370-083. "It's a system that's Against us, that's specifically targeted toward us, starting with Enforcement. Basically, we're the ones who are disproportionately Impacted."

Kemba doesn't fit the profile of most women behind the walls. The Daughter of an accountant and a schoolteacher, she led a sheltered Life nestled in the suburbs of Richmond, Va. Her days consisted of Choir practice, curfews and playing flute in her high school marching Band. As a shy sophomore at Hampton University, Kemba became Romantically involved with Peter Michael Hall, a man eight years her Senior whom she later learned was dealing drugs. Peter used her and Other college students as "mules" – people who carried his money or Weapons. Police say that he ran a $4 million cocaine circuit between New York and Virginia. He was also physically and emotionally abusive.

As authorities started closing in, Peter went on the lam and Kemba became a fugitive with him. In September 1994, broke, six months pregnant, and tired of living on the run, Kemba turned herself in to federal authorities. She pleaded guilty to conspiracy in a cocaine ring, even though she never sold or used drugs. The next month, Peter was discovered in a Seattle apartment, dead of a gunshot wound to the head. The following April, 23 year-old Kemba, a first time, non-violent offender, was sentenced to 24 and a half years in prison with no chance of parole. That's about four years longer than the average state sentence for murder or voluntary manslaughter.

"I was in a jail cell, six months pregnant, and a U.S. Marshall told me to my face that he knew if I were white, that I probably wouldn't be there," she recalls.

Emerge magazine publicized Kemba's plight, and she became a cause celebre, a walking cautionary tale for the fastest growing segment of the U.S. prison system: African-American women. In 2000, she was granted executive clemency by President Clinton after serving six and a half years. Some may dismiss the former inmate as a casualty of the War on Drugs and mandatory minimum sentencing. Yet, critics speculate that there is a definite link between racial profiling and harsh law enforcement practices. Are minorities given stricter sentences because they are profitable as prisoners?

This doesn't mean evil white men are clustered in boardrooms plotting the destruction of communities of color to increase their profit margins, but even the average unbiased Jill can't deny that incarceration is big business. Two publicly traded firms, Wackenhut Corrections Corporation (now the GEO Group) and Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), dominate the private market. The GEO Group (NYSE:GEO) had approximately 54,000 beds under management as of December 31, 2006 and revenue of $861 million. CCA (NYSE: CXW) boasted $1.3 billion in revenue last year, and it leads the industry with 72,500 beds in 65 facilities. On the CCA Web site, its 2006 annual report predicts a rosy future. "We expect that growth in the projected inmate population and limited development of new prison beds by the public sector will be favorable to the private corrections industry," CCA stated in a letter to its shareholders. "As the industry leader, we believe we are uniquely positioned to capitalize on these trends …"

"Growth in the projected inmate population" will be through the roof by 2011, according to a February report from the Pew Charitable Trusts. The Philly-based nonprofit research foundation foresees a 13% increase in the American inmate population by 2011. They estimate that $27.5 billion will be spent in new prison construction and operation. Often, as in the case of AB900, that means more dollars will go toward incarcerating inmates than to public universities, not to mention health care and other social services. And does jailing more of its citizens than any other country in the world mean that the U.S. can now enjoy safer streets and reduced crime rates? "It's a tempting leap of logic to assume the more people behind bars, the less crime there will be," said the Pew study. "But despite public expectations to the contrary, there is no clear cause and effect."

If the prison industrial complex is a postmodern plantation, is over-reliance on the Big House unavoidable? Are there viable alternatives to prison overcrowding besides building more beds?

"I think the solution is putting more money into treatment centers, community programs, and free health care and clinics," says Critical Resistance's Delgadillo. Eradicating the PIC doesn't mean letting folks off the hook for their actions, but he believes that a cultural shift needs to happen in the way prisoners are viewed. "I think, definitely, it's important to be out there doing legislative work and doing activist work, but I also think it's important to begin building the kind of world that we want, that we envision, right now in our communities."

Building that world will be a challenge, to say the least. The goal of business is to continually expand, and for-profit prisons aren't going to allow billions to slip through their fingers without a fight. But grassroots organizations like Critical Resistance, and activists like Kemba Smith, have created their own underground railroads, mentally emancipating the masses, reminding us of private prison's human cost. "When people hear about the War on Drugs and prison, they pretty much feel, 'Well, if you did the crime, you deserve the time,'" says Kemba, who speaks to high school and college students throughout the country, warning them about the perils of following in her footsteps. "But when you talk about women and broken families, and the injustices, and the [sentences] given out, that brings in a little bit more humanity and compassion."

http://www.getunderground.com/underground/features/article.cfm?Article_ID=2222

Sciortino: Seek cause of overcrowded jails

I am asking for your support for H. 1723 — “An Act Relative to Incarceration and Its Impact on Public Safety.” I have filed this bill to address the issue of overcrowding in our correctional facilities by looking at its root causes.

Throughout the commonwealth of Massachusetts, prisons and jails are overcrowded. In the first quarter of 2006, the jail populations alone were at 163 percent of their capacity. Over the past six fiscal years, the budget for the DOC has increased by $135.9 million, yet adequate capacity remains a problem. It is clear that a new approach is needed to address overcrowding.

Many of the inmates in the correctional facilities are drug offenders and people with mental illnesses. It is estimated that nearly one in six inmates committed their crimes to support a drug addiction. More than 16 percent of jail inmates suffer from some sort of mental illness, 70 percent of whom were arrested for nonviolent offenses.

When someone is picked up on the streets intoxicated, why are we paying $43,000 per year per person to lock them up rather than providing them with treatment services? At a recent forum I attended, then-DOC Commissioner Dennehy reported that there are approximately 250 people civilly committed every day, with no criminal charge whatsoever, who are there for one reason only: because there aren’t enough detox and treatment beds.

It’s too easy to simply lock these individuals in our jails. They belong in treatment for their illnesses, not in expensive, overcrowded facilities with inadequate services.

All residents are guaranteed basic rights and deserve basic human dignity. This includes people who are free citizens, people who have been victims of crime, the families and children of those imprisoned, and yes, even the people who are imprisoned in our state and county systems.

We have all read the headlines.

• Prisoners being driven mad to the point of suicide by isolation and deprivation.
• Prisoners being held longer than the time they were committed to serve.
• Medical care has been withheld, leading to prisoner illness and death.

I say we have all read the headlines, but in fact there are many stories that are left untold and need to be told. There are people here to testify that can share those stories with you and can give you a real picture of what is going on to their loved ones who are imprisoned.

When our colleagues in the DOC or county corrections share their concerns about overcrowding, we need to ask ourselves whether building more jails and prisons is the answer. I believe it is not. The more we build, the easier it is to simply lock people up without ever asking whether that is an effective way to make our communities safer.

This bill establishes a five-year moratorium on the construction or expansion of jails and prisons. During this time, a special commission will be appointed to study issues and make recommendations related to overcrowding, the effectiveness of incarceration on issues such as mental illness and substance abuse, and alternatives to sentencing for more cost-effective means to reduce overcrowding and ensure public safety.

It is clear that our current strategies for reducing overcrowding are not working. New jails and new prisons are not the answer. More money for the Department of Corrections is not the answer. Incarcerating more of our citizens who are in need of forms of treatment is not the answer. We need to reduce the harmful effects of drug use on our society through preventative substance abuse treatment, not incarceration. We need to better fund treatment for the mentally ill, many of whom are incarcerated for nonviolent offenses. We need to understand that overcrowding cannot be solved by building more correctional facilities, and that it requires a fundamental reexamination of why our facilities are overcrowded to begin with.

I ask for your support and favorable passage of this legislation. Thank you for your attention and consideration.

Carl Sciortino, D-Medford, represents parts of Somerville in the House of Representatives. This was testimony given before the Joint Committee on the Judiciary.

Michael Cutler on the Drug War

Michael Cutler: Gov. Patrick, fix Bay State drug policy
Friday, January 12, 2007

DRUG ABUSE presents such danger to public health and safety that it requires its own war, the War on Drugs. The tangible results of three decades of this war are a quadrupling of nonviolent prisoners, resulting in a steady diversion of state funds from drug treatment and to the prison system. No price is too dear for our health and safety, but health and safety are expensive to maintain.

The cost of our current abuse-prevention system, when measured in the lives lost to prison and a chronic lack of treatment available to a growing user population, is painful for its victims and expensive for taxpayers to bear. When the policy stakes and costs are high, leaders demand an accounting, to ensure progress on important policy objectives and to control the costs of a critical program.

For the mounting costs of this policy, the evidence of improvement in our health and safety is scant. Our existing arrest-and-imprisonment policy's impact on neighborhood safety, the incidence of drug abuse and adolescent access to toxic drugs (and nontoxic marijuana) has been a failure by any reasonable definition.

Despite such indisputable failure, state political leaders such as attorney generals and most district attorneys uniformly have opposed legislative reform of this failed policy. Given the unsustainable costs in lives and money to maintain a war policy yielding dubious benefits, leaders should promote to the public the need for change, demanding visible improvement to health and safety to justify the war's costs in lives and money.

Many responsible leaders, including the late Massachusetts and U.S. Atty. Gen Elliott Richardson, as well as Watergate prosecutor Sam Dash, newscasterWalter Cronkite and former Secretary of State George Schultz, have denounced current policy for causing more harm to individuals and communities than the illegal drugs that the current policy seeks to interdict. Leadership heeds the wisdom of experts and hears the growing discontent of policy victims and former supporters. There is a way to achieve the objectives that current policy fails to deliver.

A growing number of states, several with Republican leadership, are changing course from strict criminal prohibition of illegal drug use (including re-commitment for non-abstinence) to policies emphasizing honest education and abuse treatment instead of detention. These reforms reserve criminal intervention for crimes of violence, and reserve treatment resources for abusers rather than "mere users" whose use is not disabling.

The objective of reform policy is improvement rather than perfection, recognizing the values of stability, safety and self-supporting conduct can be reached short of zero-tolerance abstinence. It is beyond reasonable dispute that drug abuse is a treatable disease with relapse being a frequently expected symptom that cannot be eliminated by imposing or threatening imprisonment. Current policy ignores this reality. Leadership is recognizing and acknowledging reality, however uncomfortable.

Mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenders should be eliminated (as other states have done), returning sentencing discretion to judges, reducing the life-disabling impacts of prison and freeing the prison budget to fund more outpatient treatment. Mandatory sentences already being served also must be changed, to allow the same parole eligibility as non-drug nonviolent offenders.

Given the 10-fold difference between the cost of imprisonment and community-based treatment, and the documented reduction in recidivism rates for treatment compared to prison, budgetary savings are inevitable. A prime use of these saved funds should be their diversion to secure drug abuse and mental-health treatment on demand. Everyone seeking treatment regardless of income or insurance should have access to effective outpatient or residential (if necessary to protect public safety) care, with care-providers paid an adequate wage to develop continuity of care for indigent patients.

Government data establish that improved access to treatment not only reduces the incidence of abuse significantly, but also dramatically reduces the cost of government services from levels formerly consumed by stabilized abusers. This strategy will save more lives and money than our war policy.

One definition of insanity is repeating the same behavior but expecting different results. We have spent good money after bad trying to arrest and imprison our way out of the problem of drug abuse.

Governor Patrick, by changing course you have an opportunity to lead us to a promised land of safer neighborhoods, healthier families, less drug abuse and lower state budgets. Your leadership can save lives and money.

Michael D. Cutler is a lawyer with 33 years' experience in the public and private sectors. His practice focuses on murder appeals, mental-health commitments and the impact of criminal- justice and public-health strategies on drug abuse and mental illness.

http://www.projo.com/opinion/contributors/content/CT_cutler12_01-12-07_SK3N20V.1d9c074.html

NY Times: Juvenile Injustice

May 11, 2007
Editorial

Juvenile Injustice

The United States made a disastrous miscalculation when it started automatically trying youthful offenders as adults instead of handling them through the juvenile courts. Prosecutors argued that the policy would get violent predators off the streets and deter further crime. But a new federally backed study shows that juveniles who do time as adults later commit more violent crime than those who are handled through the juvenile court.

The study, published last month in The American Journal of Preventive Medicine, was produced by the Task Force on Community Preventive Services, an independent research group with close ties to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. After an exhaustive survey of the literature, the group determined that the practice of transferring children into adult courts was counterproductive, actually creating more crime than it cured.

A related and even more disturbing study by Campaign for Youth Justice in Washington finds that the majority of the more than 200,000 children a year who are treated as adults under the law come before the courts for nonviolent offenses that could be easily and more effectively dealt with at the juvenile court level.

Examples include a 17-year-old first-time offender charged with robbery after stealing another student's gym clothes, and another 17-year-old who violated his probation by stealing a neighbor's bicycle. Many of these young nonviolent offenders are held in adult prisons for months or even years.

The laws also are not equally applied. Youths of color, who typically go to court with inadequate legal counsel, account for three out of every four young people admitted to adult prison.

With 40 states allowing or requiring youthful offenders to spend at least some time in adult jails, state legislators all across the country are just waking up to the problems this practice creates. Some states now have pending bills that would stop juveniles from being automatically transferred to adult courts or that would allow them to get back into the juvenile system once the adult court was found to be inappropriate for them.

Given the damage being done to young lives all over the country, the bills can't pass soon enough.

War on Drugs

CNN’s Lou Dobbs is out to revitalize the war on drugs, claiming in a recent commentary that we’ve “been in retreat” for three decades, and promising ongoing coverage of “a war that is inflicting even greater casualties than the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan” on his show in the following week. Drug reporting often brings out the worst in the media – partial reporting, dodgy, context-free statistics, and moral posturing. So how did the “Dobberman” do?

http://www.stats.org/stories/2007/lou_dobbs_drugs_mar02_07.htm

Hard time for state prisons

The following appeared on Boston.com:
Headline: Hard time for state prisons
Date: April 24, 2007

"OUTGOING Correction commissioner Kathleen Dennehy confronted a culture of secrecy, tolerance of inmate abuse, and rigidity when she took control of the state prison system in 2003 after the ouster of her predecessor by then-Governor Romney. But now it is the reform-minded Dennehy who is under a cloud, and who has been asked to leave her post by Governor Patrick, ..."

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