JAIL TIME WON'T STOP DRUG ABUSE

President Bush, if the reports are to be believed, has settled on John P.
Walters to replace Gen. Barry McCaffrey as head of the Office of National
Drug Control Policy.

At one level, the nomination would be no surprise. It fits the pattern that
has the president turning to retreads from his father's administration to
fill key positions. Walters was deputy to drug "czar" William Bennett under
the previous Bush administration.

Walters, almost alone among those who've spent serious professional time
and attention on drug abuse in America, harbors not the slightest misgiving
over the fact that we've been crowding our prisons almost to the bursting
point with non-violent drug offenders.

Indeed, he thinks we'd be better off if we got off our soft-headed
treatment kick and jailed more drug offenders. And while we're at it, he
wrote in the March 5 issue of The Weekly Standard, we'd do well to abandon
three of "the great urban myths of our time":

That we are locking up too many people for possession.

That we are locking drug offenders up for excessively long sentences.

That "the system is unjustly punishing young black men."

These are myths? Officials across the country are rethinking the mandatory
minimum sentences that have fed the prison population explosion. Listen to
President Bush himself in a January interview on CNN:

"I think a lot of people are coming to the realization that maybe long
minimum sentences for the first-time users may not be the best way to
occupy jail space and/or heal people from their disease."

In that interview, Bush also said we ought to be moving to eliminate the
sentencing disparities for crack and powder cocaine.

Not Walters, who is on record against re-examining the sentencing
disparities and for mandatory minimums. As for the peculiar impact of drug
enforcement on young black men (and increasingly on young black women as
well) :

"Crime, after all, is not evenly distributed throughout the society. It is
common knowledge that the suburbs are safer than the inner city, though we
are not supposed to mention it."

That, of course, is sleight of hand. The relative danger of the inner
cities might reasonably account for higher incarceration rates for violence.

But it was drug arrests that were being discussed, and most of the experts
on these matters say the drug use rates are roughly equal for blacks and
whites. But according to Ethan Nadelmann of the Lindesmith Center, blacks
are arrested for drug offenses at six times the rate for whites.

Perhaps Walters is doing a similar bit of legerdemain when he denies that
get-tough drug laws are needlessly crowding our prisons. "Throughout the
1980s and 1990s," he wrote in The Weekly Standard, "violent crimes vastly
outpaced drug offenses as the cause of the prison population's rapid growth."

Jason Ziedenberg of the Justice Policy Institute cites numbers from the
Bureau of Justice Statistics that lead to a different conclusion. "Every
year since 1989," he says, "the number of people sent to state prisons for
drug offenses has exceeded the number sent to state prisons for violent
offenses. In 1980, about 10,000 people went to state prisons for drug
offenses. By 1988- 89, the number was up to about 60,000." Ziedenberg adds
that in 1970, the majority of inmates were serving time for violent
offenses. By 2000, the majority of those in all prisons and jails were
non-violent offenders.

But the statistics are almost a distraction. The real issue is policy, not
numbers. Walters seems really to believe that we can incarcerate our way
out of our drug problem .

"The more I look at this, even since I left government, this is a supply
problem. ... Drugs are so attractive to people that some people will give
up everything in their life to consume them," he told a session of the
Senate Judiciary Committee four years ago.

If that's the problem, how can anyone believe that the threat of jail time
is the solution?

About the job

Boise Mayor Brent Coles Coles was named earlier this year as one of about a
half-dozen possible candidates to head the Office of National Drug Control
Policy.

President Bush now is expected to name John P. Walters the nation's drug
czar, according to USA Today and The Washington Post.

Walters is president of the 650-member Philanthropy Roundtable, a nonprofit
Washington, D.C., organization that provides grant-makers with information
about giving.

Write William Raspberry, Washington Post Writers Group, 1150 15th St. NW,
Washington, D.C. 20071.