Pubdate: Tue, 06 Mar 2001
Source: Weekly Standard, The (US)
Copyright: 2001 The Weekly Standard
Contact:  1150 17th Street, N.W., Suite 505, Washington, DC 20036-4617
Website: http://www.weeklystandard.com/
Author: John P. Walters
Note: John P. Walters, president of the Philanthropy Roundtable,
was deputy director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy
during the previous Bush administration.

DRUG WARS

Just Say No . . . To Treatment Without Law Enforcement

THE WAR ON CRIME AND DRUGS is rapidly losing ground to the war on
punishment and prisons.  Recently, Newsweek featured Robert Downey Jr.
on the cover, along with a series of articles and essays on the drug
problem with the general theme that law enforcement and incarceration
don't work and that we need to embrace treatment and new treatment
drugs.  But Downey only seems to get treated for his addiction when he
is forced to by the criminal justice system.  Indeed, it's hard to
imagine a worse advertisement for the effectiveness of drug treatment
than Robert Downey Jr.

The therapy-only lobby is alive and well and more dogmatic than ever.
If it weren't for the ideology associated with treatment -- addiction
is a disease, not a pattern of behavior for which people can be held
responsible -- law enforcement and punishment would be natural
partners of the treatment providers (remember Marion Barry, whose
treatment followed his arrest).  The evidence is that coerced
treatment works at least as well as voluntary treatment, and it has
long been a staple of effective treatment programs that the addict
must take responsibility for himself.

Newsweek makes much of the promise of new wonder drugs for treatment,
but what new anti-drug drug is likely to work substantially better
than the drugs we have to block tobacco craving ("the patch" and "the
gum") and the medication we have to make alcohol consumption a
sickening experience for alcoholics?  These are useful tools, but
there are still many smokers and alcoholics.  If anything, the trend
of anti-drinking and anti-smoking efforts today is to criminalize
certain aspects of use and to attack availability.

What really drives the battle against law enforcement and punishment,
however, is not a commitment to treatment, but the widely held view
that (1) we are imprisoning too many people for merely possessing
illegal drugs, (2) drug and other criminal sentences are too long and
harsh, and (3) the criminal justice system is unjustly punishing young
black men.  These are among the great urban myths of our time.

According to the most current data, in 1997 only 8.8 percent of the
1,046,705 individuals in state prisons were there for drug possession.
  Drug trafficking offenses accounted for 11.3 percent of those
imprisoned; property offenses 22 percent; and violent crimes 47.2
percent.  Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, violent crimes vastly
outpaced drug offenses as the cause of the prison population's rapid
growth.  The situation at the federal level is even more lopsided.  In
fiscal year 1999, just 2.2 percent of federal drug convictions were
for simple possession.

And even these numbers overstate the incarceration rate for drug
possession. Although we do not know for sure how many of those
sentenced for a drug possession conviction were actually traffickers
who were allowed to plead guilty to a lesser charge, or repeat
offenders whose record put them in prison for their most recent
offense, or both, the available data suggest the numbers are very
large indeed.  In fiscal year 1999, the U.S. Sentencing Commission
reports that 94.2 percent of the 20,893 federal drug offenders had
pleaded guilty, usually to a lesser charge.  Moreover, federal law
contains a "bypass" provision to allow low-level, nonviolent offenders
to avoid mandatory minimum sentences. The idea that our prisons are
filled with people whose only offense was possession of an illegal
drug is utter fantasy.

But are prison sentences too long?  With the sharp drop in crime, have
we made criminal punishment too harsh?  In the Winter 2001 issue of
the Public Interest, Paul H. Robinson argues that we have.  Even
Robinson acknowledges, however, that there is considerably less to the
drop in crime than conventional wisdom would suggest.  He notes that
"the declining crime rate of the last eight years would have to
continue unbroken for another three decades before we returned to the
crime levels the Baby Boomers enjoyed as children." And consider this:
Americans are still more likely to experience what statisticians call
"violent victimization" than to be injured in a car crash.

Nonetheless, Robinson argues that longer sentences and "three strikes"
laws are unjust because they pursue a policy of incapacitating
criminals under the "cloak" of punishment.  They punish offenders not
just for what they have done, but also for what they are viewed as
likely to do in the future.  But Robinson makes too little of the fact
that incapacitation -- protecting the public from criminals,
particularly repeat offenders -- has almost always been one of the
goals of punishment in our criminal justice system.

The most recent data, moreover, reveal how limited has been the
"success" of incapacitation: In 1997, 46.6 percent of state prisoners
had been on probation or parole when they were arrested for the
offense for which they were serving time.  The same data also indicate
that 91.1 percent of state prisoners were violent or repeat offenders
or both.

Neither is it true that the prison population is disproportionately
made up of young black men.  Crime, after all, is not evenly
distributed throughout society.  It is common knowledge that the
suburbs are safer than the inner city, though we are not supposed to
mention it.  In 1998, of the 7,276 murders in the United States that
involved a single offender and a single victim, 5,133 of the victims
were male and 3,309 were black.

According to the FBI, 3,565 of the offenders in these murder cases
were black, and 3,067 of the murders involved both a black victim and
a black offender.  In 1998, black males between the ages of 14 and 17
were almost 6 times more likely than white males to be victims of
murder or non-negligent manslaughter; black males between 18 and 24
were over 8 times more likely to be victims; and for those 25 and
over, black males were murder victims at a rate 7.6 times that of
white males.  Whether one looks at murder, violent crime in general,
or drug trafficking, criminals overwhelmingly victimize people like
themselves.

It should be obvious, then, who will be harmed most if fewer violent
and repeat offenders and drug traffickers are punished and sentences
are substantially reduced.  Though some who call for such reforms have
the best of intentions, they recommend a course not of compassion but
of cruelty.  Instead of retreating from punishment, we should be
contemplating the limited demographic window before us: By 2010, the
population between the ages of 15 and 17, just entering the most
crime-prone years, will be 31 percent larger than it was in 1990.  Now
is our chance to make prevention and enforcement work.
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