| The year 2008 marked the 35th anniversary of passage of the Rockefeller drug laws. The details of the laws are described here, but their general intent can be described quite simply: they replaced discretionary sentencing by judges with extremely harsh mandatory sentences. Over the past 35 years, the percentage of the New York State prison that is in jail for drug related offenses has increased from about 5 percent to nearly 40 percent. Meanwhile, there has been no apparent effect on crime rates, which went up during the 80s and early 90s and have come down drastically since (it's worth noting that, for example, over the past fifteen years, the overall incarceration rate has stayed roughly the same, with a slight increase, while the rates of violent crime have gone down by about two-thirds).
Here is testimony from New York State Corrections Commissioner Thomas A. Coughlin:
Let me summarize the impact of the Rockefeller drug laws. . . upon the prison population . . . and why I think we desperately need to modify our approach to the drug epidemic plaguing New York State.
[....]
My position has long been that prison space is a finite resource. We should be filling them with the people we built them for -- the violent predator and repeat offenders. Not the guy who got caught with a few bucks worth of crack. The time is long overdue for the Legislature to recognize this distinction and enact some basic reforms to our sentencing structure.
I firmly believe that drug addiction affecting the street level addict can be far more successfully treated in community settings, instead of the prison environment. It used to be that offenders came to prison and got the high school diploma they never earned on the outside. Now, street addicts are coming to $100,000 prison cells that cost $27,000 a year to operate . . . to get the same drug treatment that could be available at $5,000 to $10,000 per person on the street.
Depressingly enough, that was 15 years ago! And Pataki's 2004 reforms to the law did little to change the essential nature of the laws.
|
There's no end to the remarkable numbers that tell the story here: in a fascinating post on upstate prisons, Robinia discovered that:
Nearly 30 percent of new residents in Upstate New York in the 1990s were prisoners. Upstate gained 21,000 new prisoners during the decade, an increase that was accompanied by a growing number of prison staff, as well as inmates' relatives. Upstate has a larger share of prisoners than the nation as a whole-1.1 percent of its population in 2000, compared to just 0.7 percent of the U.S. population.
Of course, insanely high rates of incarceration are by no means peculiar to New York State: in fact, New York State's rate of incarceration is about 20% lower than the national average.
The United States has five percent of the world's population and twenty-five percent of the world's prison population. For the wealthiest country on earth to incarcerate its citizens at five times the average international rate is disgraceful. On a more hopeful note, Virginia Senator Jim Webb hopes to try to change that:
Webb believes he can guide the nation back. "Contrary to so much of today's political rhetoric," he wrote, "to do so would be an act not of weakness but of strength." |
