Pubdate: Sun, 10 May 2015 Source: Age, The (Australia) Copyright: 2015 The Age Company Ltd Contact: http://www.theage.com.au/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/5 Author: Nick O'Malley CALLING A TRUCE In a Rare Moment of Detente, Democrats and Republicans Have Both Admitted That America's War on Drugs and the Subsequent Tough-On-Crime Policies Have Failed. How Did We Get Here? Politicians from across the divided political spectrum now agree tough policies on drugs and mass incarceration have failed, blighting inner-city communities. On the last Tuesday of April they buried Freddie Gray in a white coffin with gold trim at the Woodlawn Cemetery in Baltimore. Gray was 25 when he died, his neck broken and his voice box crushed, in police custody after he had been arrested for making eye contact with a police officer. Within hours a state of emergency would be in place across the city and ranks of police and soldiers would be confronting both protesters and rioters, as they had in recent months in cities across the United States. That same day in New York an extraordinary book of essays was launched, proving, finally, that the tough-on-crime consensus that helped crowd America's prisons and blight its inner-city neighbourhoods and spurred the street battles waged in Baltimore in the past few weeks has unravelled. The end of an era of mass incarceration in the US is in sight, and the ramifications of this change are already being felt not only across America but around the world. The book, Solutions: America's Leaders Speak out on Criminal Justice, was launched at the Brennan Centre for Justice at the prestigious New York University's law school. Its foreword is written by former president Bill Clinton and it contains essays by Hillary Clinton, other leading Democrats such as Vice President Joe Biden and Cory Booker, an African-American senator from New Jersey who is considered a future leader. But it also included many of the leading Republican presidential contenders such as Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Scott Walker and Mike Huckabee. Even firebrands Ted Cruz and Rick Perry contributed. Though he did not contribute, Republican presidential candidate, Jeb Bush, has also dramatically softened the zero-tolerance stance of his years as governor of Florida. One of the book's co-editors, Nicole Fortier, said she was surprised at the reception she was given when she contacted these candidates and asked for a contribution. Rather than hesitating, the various leaders jumped at the chance to contribute. Their offices wanted feedback and advice. Some asked if they could have more length. But it was the content of the submissions that stunned her when they began arriving. Each politician from across the viciously divided American political spectrum agreed that mass incarceration must end. This turnaround in political will is extraordinary. The war on drugs began under President Richard Nixon, but it was Bill Clinton who opened a new front in 1994 after another surge in crime statistics across America. That year he introduced an omnibus crime bill that expanded the death penalty and encouraged states to lengthen prison terms and adopt mandatory sentences. It scrapped funding for inmate education. As a result of these laws, and other tough measures adopted by federal and state governments, America now has the biggest-per-capita prison population in the world. The figures are dizzying. It locks up one in 100 American adults and has 25 per cent of the world's prison population with just 5 per cent of the world's population. One in 28 children have a parent in prison. Considered together, America's prison population would be the size of its 37th largest state. Half of all offenders are in prison for nonviolent offences. The Clinton crime bill was, the Atlantic magazine recently noted, backed by every Congressional Democrat but one. In the new book Clinton concedes, "plainly, our nation has too many people in prison and for too long - we have overshot the mark". It is the growing consensus that, by incarcerating vast swaths of the urban poor, America has broken families, shattered whole communities, increasing the chances of further incarceration. In inner cities where crime is highest and police are most needed, police are seen as occupying forces rather than civil servants. They are feared and loathed by the populations that need them most. While America's unemployment rate is rapidly falling, its long-term unemployment remains stubbornly high, in part because employers are reluctant to hire ex-cons. This, in turn, promotes recidivism. A new campaign to reverse that perverse result has been launched. Called ban the box it calls on employers to pledge not to ask applicants to tick a box if they have a record. Instead, it asks them to ask the question in an interview when the applicant might have a chance to explain their situation. What has driven this remarkable change in political will is debatable. The protests on streets in many American cities, now commonly referred to by activists as "uprisings" might have contributed to the urgency of the movement. It is also clear that, during the long recession, states could no longer afford to keep locking people up, especially when a single inmate cost them as much as a police officer or teacher might each year. Social scientists are now identifying so-called "million-dollar blocks" - those in poor neighbourhoods with collapsing infrastructure where the government is spending $US1 million ($1.3 million) each year locking up residents of single blocks. A Columbia University lab identified many such blocks and found when inmates returned home they could expect to last an average of three years before being jailed again. But the overwhelming factor - the factor that makes this an issue that politicians are willing to address -is that there has been an unprecedented collapse in the crime rate. Since the era when Clinton went tough on crime and New York City adopted its infamous "broken windows" zero-tolerance policy, American crime rates have fallen by half. One of the more interesting observers of crime and punishment and policing in particular in America is Radley Balko, who noted in a Washington Post column that people vote on criminal justice issues only when they are in fear and Americans no longer fear crime as they once did. "While most people continue to erroneously tell pollsters that crime is getting worse nationwide, on the more pertinent question - whether Americans fear walking alone in their neighbourhood the percentage answering yes hasn't been above 40 per cent since the early 1990s." This is because, Balko argues, "in 2013, there were nearly 9000 fewer homicides, about 27,000 fewer rapes, and about 368,000 fewer aggravated assaults than there were in 1991, even though the country's population increased by 64 million people." Asked if a de-escalation in the war on drugs might see crime levels rise, the Brennan Centre's Nicole Fortier says no. In the book What Caused the Crime Decline? the Brennan Centre found incarceration had a limited and diminishing impact on crime levels, one that had almost become irrelevant by 2000, accounting for just 1 per cent of the decrease. The true cause is layered and complicated, the book argues, and includes increasing incomes and consumer confidence, decreased alcohol consumption, and the better targeting of police resources through the use of statistical analysis of crime patterns. Another study by the National Academies' National Research Council found that "the growth in incarceration rates reduced crime, but the magnitude of the crime reduction remains highly uncertain and the evidence suggests it was unlikely to have been large". With the panic over crime receding, some states have already begun ending the drug war, the crucial contributor to mass incarceration. Many states have decriminalised possession of small amounts of marijuana, while two Colorado and Washington, as well as the city of Washington, DC - have taken the extraordinary step of legalising the drug for recreational use. President Barack Obama, who has made criminal justice reform central to his final years in office, has ordered his Justice Department not to intervene by enforcing federal drug laws. This turnaround in America's war on drugs is already having an impact on law and order around the world. Prohibition enforced by strict criminal sanctions was largely an American invention imposed around the world through treaties and diplomatic pressure. On Thursday the United Nations held a debate at its New York headquarters on the issue at the request of Uruguay, Mexico and Colombia, which argued that, as some American states no longer criminalises all drug possession, they should no longer be compelled to wage the American drug war. They want the treaties rewritten. The meeting was greeted by a letter from a group of 100 drug policy and human rights organisations, including the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch, calling on the UNto reform the way it treats drugs and for member countries to respect those governments that have or will legalise or decriminalise narcotics. "Existing US and global drug control policies that heavily emphasise criminalisation of drug use, possession, production and distribution are inconsistent with international human rights standards and have contributed to serious human rights violations," they write. "Criminalisation of the drug trade has dramatically enhanced the profitability of illicit drug markets, fuelling the operations of groups that commit abuses, corrupt authorities, and undermine democracy and the rule of law in many parts of the world." The groups believe "human rights principles, which lie at the core of the United Nations charter, should take priority over provisions of the drug conventions". Some at the UN already acknowledge the problem. In 2012 the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights issued a report finding that "excessively punitive approaches to drug control have resulted in countless human rights violations, including the right to health". The discussions in New York on Thursday were in preparation for the UNGeneral Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) on Drugs in 2016. The special session was originally scheduled for 2019 but was brought forward due to pressure from Latin American countries, where governments have become increasingly concerned about how the war on drugs has affected crime and development in the region. They believe, as many American policymakers now do, that imprisonment is far more harmful to drug users and to their communities than the drugs they are being imprisoned for using. Whatever happens in the UN next year, it now seems certain that whoever wins the 2016 presidential election will continue with efforts to reduce America's prison population, rein back zero-tolerance policies and de-escalate the war on drugs. Though the political leaders who contributed to the Brennan Centre book do not have a common approach on how to achieve this, there are areas of broad agreement, Fortier says. Most agree on the need to steer the mentally ill and non-violent offenders away from prison and that mandatory minimum sentences are destructive and need to be repealed. Whatever the outcome it will take years to unpick the diabolical confusion of law and regulation that can still force American judges to steal lifetimes from the pettiest offenders. Back in Baltimore on Thursday the Baltimore Sun told the story of Ronald Hammond, who appeared in a local courtroom in 2011 on a charge of possessing 5.9 grams of marijuana. The district court judge thought the case was preposterous. "5.9 grams won't roll you a decent joint," Judge Askew Gatewood said. "Why would I want to spend taxpayer's money putting his little raggedy butt in jail feeding him, clothing him, cable TV, internet, prayer, medical expense, clothing on $5 worth of weed?" The judge urged Hammond to plead guilty so he could free him on parole. But then it turned out that Hammond was already on parole for selling $40 worth of crack to an undercover officer. With a parole infraction Hammond copped a mandatory minimum sentence of 20 years. He is due for release in 2028, though the current maximum penalty for possession of 10 grams or less is a $100 fine. He told the Sun that when he heard the sentence, "A chill went from the top of my head to the bottom of my toes." - --- MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom