COMMENTARY
Rod Watson: Drug laws lack a crucial factor: sanity
It’s not often that the right thing turns out to be the money-saving thing. But that would be the case if New York politicians find the guts to admit that mandatory sentencing laws for nonviolent drug offenders are a waste of money.
Given the state’s $14 billion budget gap and the acknowledged futility of closing it with taxes on soda pop and haircuts, the millions that could be saved by undoing the Rockefeller drug laws should appeal to any politician addicted to the easy fix.
Repealing those discredited laws also would have another benefit: It would restore credibility to a criminal-justice system discredited by its racist impact.
In a new analysis of the drug laws, the New York Civil Liberties Union uses shaded maps to illustrate what has long been suspected: The laws target minorities.
In Buffalo, for instance, you don’t have to know anything about the city to figure out where most blacks and Hispanics live. Just look at the graphics. Maps depicting the rates of prison admissions and expenditures to lock up drug offenders are shaded most heavily on the East Side and Lower West Side.
That might be defensible, except for one fact: Studies show that whites, blacks and Hispanics use drugs at comparable rates. Yet nearly 90 percent of the people in New York’s prisons for drug crimes are black and Hispanic.
It’s no wonder the NYCLU talks about “New York’s Jim Crow Laws.” If whites were being jailed so far in excess of their drug-use rates, how long would such laws last?
“This isn’t about punishment, this is about race,” says John L. Curr III, regional ACLU executive director.
The NYCLU study follows one in January by the New York State Commission on Sentencing Reform, which found that blacks made up 53 percent of drug offenders in state prisons nationwide, while comprising only 13 percent of the population.
While police and prosecutor discretion plays a role, it’s ultimately the mandatory- minimum sentencing provisions —like those in the 1973 Rockefeller drug laws—that force lengthy prison terms on nonviolent users while hamstringing judges.
Many New Yorkers will be repulsed by the racial realities of this so-called drug war. But for those who won’t lose sleep over minorities ground up in a system that destroys families and communities, they still might ponder the waste of tax dollars.
Experts say it costs $45,000 to $50,000 to lock someone up for a year. That compares with about $30,000 for residential drug treatment, and about $14,000 for outpatient treatment.
“What they need to do is look at the facts,” Curr contends. “This is a cost issue.”
No one is talking about going soft on killers. Those who shoot down innocent Buffalo kids in a drug war get no sympathy here. The violence wracking black and Hispanic neighborhoods deserves a commensurate response.
But there’s a difference between gun-toting dealers and hapless addicts. Courts need the flexibility to respond to that difference. Plus, if we treat nonviolent users, we reduce the demand that fuels the street violence.
After minor reforms in 2004 and 2005, the Assembly this month passed a bill to restore judicial discretion, emphasize treatment and bring sanity to drug laws. If the governor and Senate have any qualms, they could look at the racial disparity between those involved in drugs and those locked up for drugs, and think about the money being wasted.
Or they could just look at the budget gap.
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