There has emerged over the last decade a broad consensus among policy experts, criminal justice scholars and lawmakers that the War on Drugs, with its singular emphasis on incarceration, has failed.
In 1993, on the 20th anniversary of the Rockefeller Drug Laws, New York State Corrections Commissioner Thomas Coughlin, III, said the state was "lock[ing] up the wrong people ... for the wrong reasons."
Former Republican state senator John Dunne was a sponsor of the state's mandatory sentencing scheme for drug offenses. He subsequently organized a coalition that has advocated for fundamental reform of the Rockefeller Drug Laws. In 2004 he observed, in a television spot, "the Rockefeller Drug Laws have been a well-documented failure."
Yet, as the 36th anniversary of these laws approaches, the state continues locking up the wrong people for the wrong reasons.
This report presents and marshals the empirical evidence that demonstrates New York's mandatory-minimum drug sentencing scheme has failed, utterly, to accomplish its stated objectives. It has not reduced the availability of drugs or deterred their use; it has not made us safer.
The overwhelming majority of those serving time for drug offenses have been convicted of low-level, nonviolent offenses. Many of those individuals have substance abuse problems, and many suffer from a range of disabilities that will not be addressed in prison.
They leave prison prepared for little else but failure and re-incarceration. These individuals are all but guaranteed a vastly diminished earning capacity, if any at all. Families come apart. And because prosecution of drug offenses targets neighborhoods that are already under great social and economic stress, the drug war destabilizes entire communities.
For this dysfunctional approach to criminal justice policy, New York taxpayers pay dearly. Based on cost estimates calculated by the New York State Commission on Sentencing Reform, taxpayers will pay about $600 million to incarcerate drug offenders in 2009 alone.
The costs are not only fiscal. The selective enforcement of the drug laws has done great damage to the integrity of the criminal justice system. The state's drug sentencing laws are the legacy of a grim racial history. And the nature of the injustice worked by these laws can only be fully understood in this historical context.
From the late 19th Century into the 1960s, Jim Crow laws were enforced with the objective of denying blacks equal protection of the laws and full participation in civil society. By the late 1960s the legal infrastructure of Jim Crow had been dismantled. But over the subsequent decades a successor was revived in statutes prohibiting drug use. Prosecution under these statutes has led to massive, unprecedented rates of incarceration - and prisons populated almost exclusively by people of color.
The Rockefeller Drug Laws are the Jim Crow laws of the 21st Century. This report includes demographic maps of urban centers throughout the state that depict in bold relief the racial and ethnic bias that informs the state's drug-law policy.
The Rockefeller Drug Laws are unjust, irrational and ineffective. Period.
The racial and ethnic profile of the population sent to prison for drug offenses is particularly striking. It is well established in scientific literature that the demographics of those who use or sell illicit drugs reflect the demographics of the general population. In other words, there are greater numbers of whites - as compared with blacks and Latinos - who use and sell drugs. However, nearly 90 percent of those incarcerated for drug offenses in New York State are black or Latino. And in this respect the year 2007 was unexceptional. Gross racial and ethnic disparities among those sent to prison for drug offenses have become statistical constants - both in New York State and nationwide.
The enactment of the Rockefeller Drug Laws in 1973 was a bold, albeit simplistic, political response to a complex public policy problem. The politics of this initiative were driven in part by then-Governor Nelson Rockefeller's aspiration for national office. Any such candidate must demonstrate a commitment to upholding law and order. And in the early 1970s there was concern among New Yorkers, and Americans generally, that a sharp rise in heroin use and property crime posed a growing threat to public safety. The governor responded by promoting, and ultimately signing into law, the nation's most harsh and inflexible drug sentencing statutes.
Here's a map of NYC from the report.
Twenty-five percent of NYC adults sent to prison in 2006 came from neighborhoods with just 4 percent of the adult population. More than half were admitted for drug offenses, and 97 percent were black or Latino - even though whites use and sell drugs in far greater numbers than blacks or Latinos
...
Community District 5, which includes East New
York, is populated largely by people of color. Just 5 percent of residents are non-Latino white. In 2006, at least 400 residents of the district were incarcerated; 40 percent of those individuals were sent to prison for drug offenses.
Community District 12, which includes the neighborhoods of Kensington and Borough Park, is 63 percent non-Latino white. In 2006, just 39 people living in the district were sent to prison. Approximately 25 percent of those individuals - about 10 - were sent to prison for drug offenses.
There's tons more data in the report and I really can not recommend it highly enough.
