If you glanced at the Times last Thursday, you might
think Governor Paterson and state legislators had finally woken up and decided
to wipe the Rockefeller drug laws off the books. ALBANY REACHES DEAL TO REPEAL
’70s DRUG LAWS, declared the page-one-above-the-fold story. Well, not exactly.
By Friday morning, when the governor held a press conference on the proposed
changes to the laws, it had become increasingly apparent that “repeal” was not
the right word.
Back in 1973, when Governor Nelson Rockefeller
hatched the idea of punishing drug users and sellers with stiff mandatory
sentences, Mayor John Lindsay denounced his plan as “merely a deceptive gesture
offering nothing beyond momentary satisfaction and inevitable disillusionment.”
The most egregious injustices were the fifteen- and twenty-to-life sentences
handed down for first-time drug crimes—more time than for kidnapping or rape or
manslaughter.
Fast-forward 36 years, and opponents are still
battling to undo these laws. They managed to eke out a few small reforms in
2004 and 2005. And now this latest plan will enable judges to send some
nonviolent drug offenders to treatment instead of prison—which sounds good, but
of course the devil is always in the details. Last week, details were hard to
come by. How many people are we really talking about? (The governor’s office
says it doesn’t yet know, but the Correctional Association, a prison-watchdog
group, estimates that it would have affected half of those now locked up on
drug charges.*) And what if you’re not an addict at all? What if it’s not
treatment you need but a high-school degree and a job? Do you have to feign
addiction to avoid prison?
What remains untouched is the basic punishment
structure of the laws. Of the 11,936 prisoners doing time for a drug crime in
New York State’s prisons at the start of this year, the largest group—a total
of 4,949—were sentenced for class-B felonies. Selling only one bag of heroin or
one vial of crack still qualifies as a B felony. While the new proposal would
empower judges to send first-time B felons to treatment instead of prison, for
those who were never addicts in the first place, the punishment remains the
same: one to nine years in prison. (And for those with a prior record who don't
get treatment, it’s a minimum of three and a half and up to twelve years.*)
The momentum that triggered these latest reforms can
be traced back to 1998, when a ragtag group of prisoners’ relatives started
holding weekly vigils outside Rockefeller Center, carrying placards with photos
of their loved ones. But when the group’s leader, Randy Credico, watched
Paterson’s press conference, he was not happy. He worries that overselling this
proposal creates the illusion that the problem has been solved, and makes it
that much more difficult to revisit the issue. “They came up with an agreement
to get people to stop complaining,” he says. “It’s not sweeping. It’s
misleading advertising. These guys may as well be selling used cars.”
*Revised since publication.
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