Pubdate: Tue, 13 Aug 2013
Source: Dallas Morning News (TX)
Copyright: 2013 The New York Times 	
Contact: http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/send-a-letter/
Website: http://www.dallasnews.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/117
Authors: Charlie Savage and Erica Goode, The New York Times

DECISIONS SIGNAL BIG SHIFT IN TOUGH-ON-CRIME POLICIES

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

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

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

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

Wave of measures

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

But the crack wave has long since passed, and violent crime rates 
have plummeted to four-decade lows, in the process reducing crime as 
a salient political issue. Traditionally conservative states, driven 
by a need to save money on building and maintaining prisons, have 
taken the lead in scaling back policies of mass incarceration.

Against that backdrop, the move away from mandatory sentences and 
Judge Shira Scheindlin's ruling on stopand-frisk practices signaled 
that a course correction on two big criminal justice issues that 
disproportionately affect minorities has finally been made, according 
to the advocates who have pushed for those changes.

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

'Re-examination'

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

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

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

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

As that fear has lessened, he said, there has been more room to be 
heard for critics who say that some policies have gone too far and 
may be counterproductive.

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

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

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

FROM WIRE REPORTS
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