PUSHING 70, SHE SHOWS DRUG WAR'S NEW FACE

Killers have come and gone since Lula McNeil entered the state penal system
in 1989.

The mother of 10 and grandmother of eight will be 72 when her scheduled
release comes up in 2003.

"They're calling me the dope-dealing granny," she sighs, "that they've got
to lock up and throw away the key."

Her offense is dealing in cocaine -- allegedly, somewhere under one ounce,
total, on three occasions in September of 1987, in and around her home in
the 3100 block of North New Jersey Street.

Her claim is that she made only one transaction and that authorities tried
to portray her as a "kingpin" even though she had no prior record for dope
trafficking. "But any amount," she concedes, "would be wrong."

Her mistake, in hindsight, was pleading innocent. Her codefendant got a
much shorter sentence by throwing himself on the court's mercy. The judge
wouldn't grant McNeil a delay when she called from a hospital on the
opening day of her trial to say she was sick.

She made it for the second day of the two-day bench trial in Marion
Superior Court, after which she got four 30-year sentences to be served
concurrently. Half that 30 must be served before parole ordinarily is
possible. With credit for 191 days in jail awaiting trial, Lula McNeil
figures to serve 14 years, more than many a homicide convict. That's the
drug law the public is deemed to desire.

She has glaucoma, bronchial trouble and other ailments. She has completed a
long list of service and rehabilitation programs at Rockville Training
Center. She has pleaded that children need her at home. But her petitions
for clemency and sentence modification have been denied.

Lula McNeil has no lawyer. She's had bad results from four of them,
including one who committed suicide after being disbarred and another who
is in prison for killing his wife.

Lula McNeil was not lucky. She was not privileged. She was not smart. And
she was not innocent.

Does she deserve to spend more than a decade of her golden years behind
bars, knitting teddy bears for state troopers to give to traumatized children?

Marion County Deputy Prosecutor Brian Jennings, who put her there, thinks
so. Working people in inner-city neighborhoods want pushers gone, and
that's his job as head of the Metro Drug Task Force.

"Dealing drugs at 30th and New Jersey in front of her grandchildren," he
says. "Nice lady."

The lady also is a statistic. Women are the fastest-growing segment of the
Indiana prison population, increasing nearly 600 percent over 20 years to
more than 1,300. Older inmates also are more numerous than before. The
principal reason, the Department of Correction says, is more drug
prosecutions and longer drug sentences.

So now we have overcrowding. We have the need for new facilities such as
Rockville, more than an hour's drive from the city where many inmates'
families live. We have inmates with the kind of family ties young male
convicts don't have. Lula McNeil has missed the funerals of two daughters,
two sons, a son-in-law, a brother and a grandson during her stay. Before
then, she was the de facto parent of some of her grandchildren.

"She was the backbone of our family," says a daughter, Rhonda Ingram. "She
held us together."

Across a visitors' table in a gleaming mall-like complex planted in western
Indiana farmland, the grandmother talks nonstop of the wrong she believes
she suffered from the justice system, and of her efforts, mostly by letter
and phone, to keep her grandchildren out of the system. She asserts she'd
be out by now if lawyers and clerks hadn't mishandled her court papers and
if various officials hadn't ignored her pleas of hardship. But she's
through applying for shortened time. No use, she says.

"One time when I first got locked up it made me bitter. I had to adjust to
the fact I'm here."

Is it especially hard not seeing her grandchildren on days like Thanksgiving?

"I don't celebrate holidays," she says. "I celebrate every day I have."