OFFICIALS SAY PRISONS DON'T WIN DRUG WAR

NEW YORK -- Keith Hollar was lucky to be in Brooklyn on the cold January
night he was busted for selling heroin to an undercover policeman.

Though he was no drug kingpin and sold barely enough drugs to support his
own habit, Hollar would be doing some serious jail time in most cities.

But in Brooklyn, repeat felons convicted of certain nonviolent drug crimes
get a choice: go to prison or get treatment for drug addiction.

Hollar chose treatment.

Brooklyn's district attorney, Charles J. Hynes, came up with the idea a
decade ago.

"We were spending enormous resources for more police, more assistant DAs,
more prisons, yet drug use and crimes related to drug use were still
climbing," Hynes recalled. "I realized that unless you tried to reduce drug
demand, all the other strategies simply weren't working."

Today, two decades after President Reagan launched the War on Drugs, a
number of prosecutors, judges, and governors across the nation have begun
to join Hynes in questioning whether long prison sentences are the best
cure for the problems of drug addiction and the crime it feeds.

"The War on Drugs is a miserable failure," Governor Gary E. Johnson of New
Mexico, a conservative Republican, said in a phone interview. "Let's stop
getting tougher on drug use. It does not work. Drugs are a medical problem,
not a criminal problem."

In New York state, Governor George Pataki, a Republican, proposed earlier
this year to repeal the state's mandatory sentences for some drug crimes.

Last November, California voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition 36,
which mandates up to one year of treatment, rather than prison time, for
nonviolent drug offenders.

Experiments along these lines are being tried, with some success, in
Connecticut, Delaware, Arizona, Oregon, and Texas.

Driving the shift in strategy has been a desire to relieve overcrowding in
courts and prisons, as well as the hope that the change will reduce both
addiction and drug-related crime.

"We are drowning in drug cases, and it's affecting our entire criminal
justice system," Judith S. Kaye, chief judge of the New York state courts,
said in her Manhattan office. "We, the courts, have a drug problem.

You can't be in denial if you have a drug problem."

Two years ago, Kaye recommended extending the Brooklyn program statewide.
"The fear, when people talk about treatment, is that they'll be labeled
'soft on crime,"' she said. "But I think it's smart on crime."

New York has more serious problems with prison overcrowding than most
states because it has more addicts and because the punishment for drug use
is so severe.

In 1973, Governor Nelson Rockefeller signed the most stringent drug laws in
the nation.

The legislation required that anyone possessing 4 ounces of heroin or
cocaine or selling 2 ounces must be sentenced to at least 15 years in
prison, the same penalty as for arson or kidnapping.

As the crack epidemic took hold, the Rockefeller laws swelled the prison
population. In 1986, just 3,000 New Yorkers were doing state time for drug
offenses. By the early 1990s, the number had multiplied 10 times.

Even now the number stands at 32,600, half of all state inmates.

Judge Jo Ann Ferdinand presides over the Brooklyn Treatment Court, which
Kaye ordered be set up in June 1996 to deal exclusively with felons
arrested for possessing drugs or, like Hollar, for selling small quantities
to support their own drug habits. (As with other alternative sentencing,
there is no leniency for big-time dealers or those who sell to children.)
Since then, 20 such courts have opened across the state, with plans for
another 20 this year.

"We used to have this notion that if you put addicts in jail where they
couldn't get drugs, that would cure their addiction," Ferdinand said. "But
it turned out curing addiction doesn't mean just not using drugs.

Send addicts to state prison, [and] 50 percent of them get rearrested
within a year of their release, because they go back on drugs."

Ferdinand holds a prison sentence over defendants' heads, but wipes the
felony off the books if they complete the program at a treatment center.

"We still consider it an experiment," she said.

So far, the numbers are good. Of 1,700 people Ferdinand has sent into
treatment in the past four years, 500 are still in treatment, and 550 have
completed it. Of the graduates, just 12 percent have committed new crimes,
one-quarter the recidivism rate of similar criminals who went to jail
rather than treatment.

Many of those involved in such programs - judges, prosecutors, and addicts
- - say that most defendants will opt for treatment only if the alternative
is a fairly stiff prison sentence.

Anne Swern, the deputy district attorney who runs Brooklyn's program, said:
"You offer someone six months or a year in prison as the alternative to
treatment, a lot of them will take the prison.

Hold out three years, they'll take treatment.

"The average age of success in our program is 32," she said. "It happens
when defendants are tired of their lives, tired of their failure, tired of
their families' seeing them as losers."

Of 13 convicted drug felons who came before Judge Ferdinand one recent
morning, four chose prison over treatment.

They were under 25, some under 20. Their crimes demanded sentences of a
year or less. By Swern's measure, they weren't ready to change.

Keith Hollar, the heroin dealer who was arrested on the streets of
Brooklyn, was ready to deal with his drug problem.

Hollar, 38, had been jailed twice before, with no lasting impact on his
behavior. A self-described "lifelong criminal," he took his first drink at
age 8, his first puff of marijuana at 12, his first heroin injection at 16.

After his arrest last January, the court offered him treatment or three to
seven years in prison.

Years earlier, he chose prison the first time he was arrested, for armed
robbery. "I wasn't interested in treatment," he recalled. "I enjoyed
getting high."

This time, though, Hollar made a different choice. "I was tired; I needed a
change," he said, sitting in a counselor's office at the Brooklyn
waterfront branch of Phoenix House, one of the oldest drug-rehabilitation
centers. There are no locks on the door at Phoenix House, but few leave.

Hollar is barely into a 12- to 18-month program, but he already feels
hopeful about the future for the first time in his life.

"I would have never come here on my own," he said. "Now I don't think they
could kick me out the door. Not a day goes by that I don't feel like
getting high. I know it's going to be a lifelong process of controlling
myself. But it is a wonderful thing to wake up in the morning and not feel
addicted."

Phoenix House is one of 150 drug centers that the Brooklyn Treatment Court
uses. The center's counselors treat addictive behavior as much as drug
addiction itself.

The program provides at least 12 months of residential treatment, followed
by three to six months of job training, job placement, and followup care.

Most drug programs across the country offer one to three months of
treatment, but many studies have concluded that longer treatment is needed.

"When we talk about effective drug treatment, we're not talking 28 days or
three months" said Joseph Califano, president of Columbia University's
National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse. "That doesn't work,
especially for heroin addicts.

They need at least a year of residential treatment."

One recent morning, Darryl Eaton inspected a new drug-treatment center,
called Serendipity II, in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant section.

Eaton, 46, is a counselor with the center's parent organization, Stay'n
Out, and, like many in his profession, is a former addict.

"Just last night, I had a dream where my ex-wife had three bags of dope and
I was figuring out where we were going to go shoot it up," Eaton said.
"I've been off drugs for 13 years, and I still dream about it."

Even now, he will not go to his old neighborhood in the Bronx, though he
has family there.

That's where he used to take drugs, and he does not want to trigger the
associations.

After all this time, does he really think that he might take drugs again if
he went back? "I don't know," he replied, "but I don't want to chance it."

A growing number of law-enforcement officials recognize the appeal of a
drug policy centered around treatment, Califano said.

The hurdles are politics and cost. "In the private sector, insurance
companies won't pay for it," he said. "In the public sector, state
legislators tell me, 'How can I fund treatment centers for people who have
been in jail, for criminals, when my people want new schools and better
roads?"'

Califano tells them that treatment is cheaper than jail. According to the
Correctional Association of New York, a state prisoner costs taxpayers
$32,000 a year, compared with $20,000 for a drug-treatment resident.

A study by the RAND Corp. calculated that, dollar for dollar, treatment
reduces national drug consumption eight times as much as imprisonment.

If the addict recovers for good, there are greater savings still, in
preventing the losses due to crimes that might have been committed to
support a drug habit and in the savings on court and jail costs that might
have followed another arrest.

In the short run, a greatly expanded drug-treatment policy may require more
money for treatment centers and the specialists to run them.

But, to Ferdinand, who was a judge in a regular criminal court for 10 years
before moving to the Brooklyn Treatment Court, there is no choice.

"When we asked ourselves why the system wasn't working, the answer was that
we weren't dealing with the fact of the addiction," she said. "Most addicts
find their way into the criminal justice system over and over.

"Each time they're here is a window of opportunity to intervene in that
cycle. We waste so many opportunities by just throwing them in jail."