Pubdate: Sun, 06 May 2001
Source: Columbia Daily Tribune (MO)
Copyright: 2001 Columbia Daily Tribune
Contact:  http://www.showmenews.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/91
Author: William Raspberry

NEW DRUG CZAR FAVORS HARD-LINE POLICY

WASHINGTON - President George W. Bush, if the reports are to be 
believed, has settled on John Walters to replace Gen. Barry McCaffrey 
as head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy. At one level, 
the nomination would be no surprise. It fits the pattern that has the 
president turning to retreads from his father's administration to 
fill key positions. Walters was deputy to drug "czar" William Bennett 
under the previous Bush administration.

At another level, though, it is a peculiar choice. Walters, almost 
alone among those who've spent serious professional time and 
attention on drug abuse in America, harbors not the slightest 
misgiving over the fact that we've been crowding our prisons almost 
to the bursting point with nonviolent drug offenders.

Indeed, he thinks we'd be better off if we got off our soft-headed 
treatment kick and jailed more drug offenders. And while we're at it, 
he wrote in the March 5 issue of The Weekly Standard, we'd do well to 
abandon three of "the great urban myths of our time":

That we are locking up too many people for possession.

That we are locking drug offenders up for excessively long sentences.

That "the system is unjustly punishing young black men."

These are myths? Officials across the country are rethinking the 
mandatory minimum sentences that have fed the prison population 
explosion. Listen to Bush himself in a January interview on CNN:

"I think a lot of people are coming to the realization that maybe 
long minimum sentences for the first-time users may not be the best 
way to occupy jail space and/or heal people from their disease."

In that interview, Bush also said we ought to be moving to eliminate 
the disparities in sentencing for crack and powder cocaine.

Not Walters, who is on record against re-examining the sentencing 
disparities and for mandatory minimums.

As for the peculiar impact of drug enforcement on young black men - 
and increasingly on young black women as well:

"Crime, after all, is not evenly distributed throughout the society. 
It is common knowledge that the suburbs are safer than the inner 
city, though we are not supposed to mention it."

That, of course, is sleight of hand. The relative unsafety of the 
inner cities might reasonably account for higher incarceration rates 
for violence.

But it was drug arrests that were being discussed, and most of the 
experts on these matters say the drug use rates are roughly equal for 
blacks and whites. But according to Ethan Nadelmann of the Lindesmith 
Center, blacks are arrested for drug offenses at six times the rate 
for whites, which might explain why they are disproportionately 
subject to mandatory minimums - and disproportionately behind bars.

Perhaps Walters is doing a similar bit of legerdemain when he denies 
that get-tough drug laws are needlessly crowding our prisons. 
"Throughout the 1980s and 1990s," he wrote in The Weekly Standard, 
"violent crimes vastly outpaced drug offenses as the cause of the 
prison population's rapid growth."

Jason Ziedenberg of the Justice Policy Institute cites numbers from 
the Bureau of Justice Statistics that lead to a different conclusion. 
"Every year since 1989," he says, "the number of people sent to state 
prisons for drug offenses has exceeded the number sent to state 
prisons for violent offenses. In 1980, about 10,000 people went to 
state prisons for drug offenses. By 1988-89, the number was up to 
about 60,000."

Ziedenberg adds that in 1970, the majority of inmates were serving 
time for violent offenses. By 2000, the majority of those in all 
prisons and jails were nonviolent offenders.

But the statistics are almost a distraction. The real issue is 
policy, not numbers. Walters seems really to believe that we can 
incarcerate our way out of our drug problem - even while many other 
equally hard-nosed observers are coming to believe that it might make 
more sense to treat drug abuse as a public health problem than as a 
criminal justice problem.

"I started in this area in the Education Department, writing 
prevention stuff on drugs with Bill Bennett," he told a session of 
the Senate Judiciary Committee four years ago. "But the more I look 
at this, even since I left government, this is a supply problem. ... 
Drugs are so attractive to people that some people will give up 
everything in their life to consume them."

If that's the problem, how can anyone believe that the threat of jail 
time is the solution?
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MAP posted-by: Josh Sutcliffe