CALIFORNIA'S EQUITABLE PROPOSITION

Drug Sentencing Favors Treatment

Drugs have always been a part of Lois Wadsworth's life. She was born to a
heroin-addicted mother who could barely care for herself, let alone a
child. At 5, she moved in with her grandparents, a straitlaced couple whose
three children all succumbed to the lure of drugs.

She grew up troubled, prone to fighting and eager for acceptance. Her
grandparents tried to shelter her from the drug use outside their home in
East Oakland, Calif., a black, once-solid working-class neighborhood hard
hit by rising unemployment and crime. But by junior high, she was smoking
pot and drinking.

"I always ran with an older crowd, a rougher crowd," said Wadsworth, 36. "I
always wanted to fit in. So I did what they did."

Wadsworth smoked her first crack rock when she was 16. That same year, she
dropped out of school. Two years later, she had a child with the boy who
had introduced her to crack. She began dealing drugs to fund her habit,
then moved on to bigger crimes. Her grandparents raised her son, now 18,
while she served time on a series of drug possession and burglary charges.

She said she tried to quit crack on her own a number of times, but that for
most of the addicts she knew, treatment was never an option. "Drug
addiction is something where you get caught by the police and sent to
jail," she said by phone from CURA, a residential drug recovery program in
Fremont where she has lived since January. Wadsworth enrolled in the
program after her last stint in state prison, where she joined one of the
drug recovery programs recently made available in California state prisons.

It took her almost two decades of addiction to get clean. Things might have
been different if her first conviction for drug possession had happened
under Proposition 36, a new California law that refers certain nonviolent
drug offenders to drug treatment programs instead of putting them behind bars.

In the past, California sentencing judges decided on a case-by-case basis
whether to refer drug offenders to treatment or to incarceration. Under the
terms of Proposition 36, all eligible defendants - nonviolent offenders
convicted solely of drug possession - may choose rehabilitation. The law
does not apply to defendants who have been convicted of serious or violent
felonies in the past five years or to repeat offenders who have been found
unresponsive to treatment. Those who choose treatment over jail or, in the
case of marijuana possession a $100 fine, will receive up to 1 year of drug
treatment and 6 months of after-care.

The new law may have an additional benefit: helping to level the playing
field for minority and poor drug offenders like Wadsworth, who is black.
Sentencing advocates say those groups have been locked up in
disproportionate numbers as a result of the state's drug enforcement
policies. Proponents of Proposition 36 say establishing a uniform standard
will eliminate racial disparities in sentencing - for example, when a judge
chooses to refer a white businessman arrested for powdered cocaine
possession to treatment but sends a black offender caught with crack
cocaine to jail.

Proposition 36, which went into effect July 1, treats drug abuse as a
public health problem first and a criminal justice problem second. It's a
significant shift in policy for California, a state that imprisons drug
offenders at 2 1/2 times the national average, according to a 2000 study
conducted by the Justice Policy Institute, which studies criminal justice
policies.

It's an equally significant shift for people like Wadsworth, who might have
benefited from early intervention instead of incarceration. "It's going to
help people of color and poor communities," said Whitney Taylor, the
campaign director for Proposition 36. "Especially those who don't have
insurance and can't afford treatment."

Waiting lists for publicly funded drug treatment programs in California
range from two weeks to as long as six months for a bed in an inpatient
center. A 30-day residential stint at a private detox facility such as the
Betty Ford Center in Southern California can cost as much as $14,900.

According to the 2000 Census, blacks and Hispanics comprise fewer than 40
percent of California's population, but state prison records show they make
up almost 67 percent of the 43,046 inmates currently serving time for drug
offenses.

"The good news is that [Proposition] 36 will disproportionately benefit
people of color, ironically because they've been disadvantaged by having
this high rate of arrest," said Marc Mauer, the author of "Race to
Incarcerate," a 1999 book on race and class disparities in the judicial system.

It's not that minorities or low-income people are more likely to use drugs.
"The stuff is everywhere, from the upper class to the down-and-dirty poor,"
said Joe Locaria, the director of CURA, where Wads-worth is being treated.
A 1999 study of substance abuse by the California Department of Alcohol and
Drug Programs found almost no variation in the rate of substance abuse
across racial groups or income levels.

"With arrests and prosecutions, that's where the disparity kicks in," said
Dan Macallair, vice president of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal
Justice in San Francisco.

"You don't have SWAT teams running through college dorms," said Taylor, now
a spokeswoman for the Lindesmith Foundation, a nonprofit drug policy reform
advocacy group in Santa Monica. "But you do in Compton."

Drug dealing and consumption tend to be more public in places like Compton,
which is both low-income and primarily black and Hispanic. That may be one
reason for the disparate arrest rate. Drug use in low-income areas is
usually handled as a criminal justice problem, while in more affluent
communities, it is seen primarily as a health issue, said Mauer, who is
also the assistant director of the Sentencing Project, a Washington,
D.C.-based nonprofit group that examines criminal justice policy.

Affluent offenders such as Robert Downey Jr., the white Hollywood actor who
served 1 year on drug charges, are "the exception to the rule," Mauer
said. And while Downey served time, he was sent to prison only after he
racked up charges for multiple drug possessions, carrying a concealed
weapon and violating the terms of his probation over a three-year period.
Ironically, Downey became one of the first beneficiaries of Proposition 36,
when he was placed on 3 years probation July 16 for a recent drug arrest.

Contrast his experience with that of Jose Gonzalez, a Hispanic CURA
resident who grew up in Union City, about 20 miles south of Oakland.
Gonzalez, 44, has been a heroin addict since he was 14, when he sampled the
drug then sweeping the streets of his lower-middle-class neighborhood.
Despite three arrests for drug possession, the only time Gonzalez was
referred to treatment was in 1974, when the program consisted, he said, of
little more than drug tests and meetings with a probation officer.

While Proposition 36 offers new hope for users who previously lacked access
to treatment, it's no cure-all. Experts say it will primarily benefit
first-time offenders, many of whom are given probation and referred to
treatment anyway. Defendants who have additional charges, such as resisting
arrest or trespassing (for example, smoking crack in an abandoned
building), won't be eligible for treatment. And the law would in all
likelihood not apply to long-term drug users like Gonzalez and Wadsworth,
who have racked up lengthy arrest records for non-drug offenses as well,
unless it was applied as a condition of probation.

Those who opposed the measure, including the Drug-Free America Foundation
and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), say the law is too broad because it
places marijuana in the same category as harder drugs, like heroin. Others,
like Locaria, fear that addicts will relapse without the threat of harsher
sanctions for drug abuse. But proponents say the preventative approach will
save tax dollars now being spent on incarceration by getting to the root of
the problem.

To Lois Wadsworth, "Proposition 36 is a blessing." Wadsworth said she
doesn't see herself as a victim of intentional racism on the part of the
judicial system, but she mourns the nearly two decades lost to her addiction.

"I want to be a better mother to my son," she said. "I want to be a whole
person."

Wadsworth has completed her GED and talks of becoming a medical assistant
so she can look after her aging grandparents. She thinks the law will give
people the chance to start over that she didn't get until now.

"It's about time that somebody realizes most of our criminality stems from
our addiction," she said.