THE DRUG WAR'S CASUALTIES

August 24 is a day Roshica Malloy would like to wipe off the calendar. It
was on that day two years ago that she was arrested for drug
possession. She was driving from New York City to her home upstate, along
with two older friends. The guys instructed Roshica, now 17, to hide a
baggie full of crack in her pants. "I thought nothing would happen," says
Roshica, visibly angry at herself. "Stupid crazy me." Stupid is
right. Outside Kingston they were pulled over by cops, who asked Roshica
if she had anything on her. She proffered the baggie and was promptly
arrested. It was 12:10 a.m. - 10 minutes into her sixteenth birthday.

Those 10 minutes made all the difference. If the whole thing had happened
half an hour earlier, when the date was August 23 and Roshica was still 15,
her case would have gone to family court and a less severe system. But in
this era of get-tough drug laws, being 16in New York as in many other
states -- means you can be tried as an adult.

Because Roshica was carrying 2.3 ounces of crack, and was arrested in a
county that is notoriously hard on drug offenders, she was initially
charged with an A2 felony, the most serious felony class (murders are A1
felonies). In her case, the mandatory sentence would be three to nine
years in jail. And for what? Roshica's actions were wrong and foolish,
but she didn't do drugs; she didn't sell them, either. Even Donald
Williams, the tough-on-crime district attorney (DA) prosecuting her case,
thought an A2 was too stringent, considering Roshica's age and that she
wasn't a dealer. "She knew she was doing wrong," he says, "but she also
deserved compassion." Roshica spent three months awaiting sentence in
jail. "I didn't see my mother for three months," she says, her voice
cracking. (Her mom couldn't afford the bus ride.) "I'd sit in my cell,
crying and saying her name. It hurts," she says, sobbing hard now.

Welcome To The Drug War

The drug laws in New York State, nicknamed the Rockefeller laws, are among
the strictest in the country.

They are a result of our nation's 30-year war on drugs, begun in the '70s,
when suburban parents began to worry about heavy drug use among their kids.
A decade or so later, crack cocaine exploded on the scene, especially in
big cities, where thousands became addicted. More and more states, as well
as the federal government, instituted their own harsh laws. Many of these
are based on "mandatory minimum" sentences, where drug crimes are
determined by the weight and type of drug a person is caught with. In cases
like these, there's little leeway for judges to make, well, judgments.

It was the mandatory minimums that had Roshica facing a possible nine years
in jail. Even if the judge wanted to give her a milder sentence, he
couldn't; only the district attorney who prosecutes the case can lessen the
charge and the punishment. "The prosecutor becomes the judge," says Maurice
Hinchey, the Democratic congressman in whose district Roshica was arrested.
"That's a very serious wrong."

There are more than a hundred mandatory minimum laws across the country.
They were meant to put evil, big-time dealers and traffickers in jail; as
it turns out, ones at the bottom--the Roshicas--who get the harsh charges .
and long sentences. "'War on drugs' is a false metaphor," says Hinchey, one
of a growing number of legislators seeking drug reforms. "It's a war on
ourselves, our own people, our children with an enormous number of
casualties." According to the Justice Policy Institute, more than 400,000
people--one in every four prisoners nationwide--are behind bars for drug
offenses.

Roshica got lucky, sort of. The DA reduced her charge to a felony (the same
class as manslaughter) and gave her "interi probation," a one-year test in
which she had to stay out of an kind of trouble.

If she blew it, she was in for at least three years.

Keeping out of trouble wasn't easy. Roshica had told the cops she was
carrying the crack for her friends, so she was considered a snitch.

Her family was threatened. At home, Roshi says, neighborhood girls tried to
goad her into behaving bad in hopes of sending her back to the slammer. She
battled on And almost made it -- but August 24 wasn't done with
her. Twelve months to the day after her arrest, on her seventeenth
birthday, she ended up in a fistfight with some girls and was charged with
assault.

Today Roshica is back in court, waiting to hear if she's heading back to
jail. Her cat-shaped green eyes are cloudy with sleep; her hands nervously
twirl a Pepsi bottle. "I'm so scared," she says over and over. "I'm just
so scared."

Thousands of kids like Roshica, wittingly or not, find themselves caught up
in a war they don't understand. And if there's one thing most of them have
in common, it's the color of their skin. According to a study by Human
Rights Watch, African Americans make up 63 percent of drug offenders in
America. "If you think this means blacks do more drugs, you're wrong,"
says Nora Callahan of the November Coalition, a non-profit drug policy
reform organization. "most drug use here is among middle-class whites,"
she says. "Most people incarcerated are of color." Racism is built into
the laws: Penalties for drugs like crack cocaine (a poor person's drug) are
much stiffer than for drugs like powder cocaine (a "white," middle-class drug).

Blowing It

Jermel Jacklin, 20, from New York City's South Bronx projects, was also
dumb and reckless enough to carry drugs for a friend. He's been at the
Green Correctional Facility in Coxsackie, New York, almost a year. Eighteen
months ago, Jermel, then 19, and a pal were staying at a hotel in Kingston
- -- coincidentally, the place Roshica was nabbed -- when police raided the
room. The cops found five grams of crack and arrested both guys. Jermel
pleaded guilty to possession. He got five years, with probation: He'd stay
out of jail, if he stayed out of trouble for five full years.

But he didn't. Less than a month later, Jermel was back and carrying
again--self-destructive behavior even he can't explain. "I know what I did
was wrong," he says. He was charged with possession; jail was a given this
time. At his arraignment, he saw a guy get probation for rape; Jermel's own
sentence suddenly seemed out of whack. "I mean, this guy did something so
bad to a person, I can't even think of a word for it, and he gets
probation," says Jermel, who got four-and-a-half to nine years.

As prisons go, Green isn't bad. Jermel isn't locked in a cell. He works,
plays basketball, cooks and takes GED classes. "My main goal is to be back
with my family.

I want to get a good job. I want to raise kids," he says. No one knows
better than Jermel how tough that will be. "Lots of stressful things go
down in my neighborhood. I was twisted in my mind," he says. "You see nice
things on TV, it messes you up. Money can make a man crazy." Prison can,
too, he says: "People get out, go back on the street, see things they miss.
They got to catch up, they get active in their old tricks, only ten times
worse."

A New Way

Jermel has put his finger on a problem that studies confirm: Drug parolees
often land right back in jail. That's why many policymakers are moving away
from a lock-'em-up-and-throwaway-the-key mentality to more compassionate
(and practical) alternatives. "The impetus for drug-law reform has never
been stronger," Edward Jurith, acting director of the White House Office of
National Drug Control Policy, has said. "We cannot simply arrest our way
out of drug abuse and drug-related crime."

Jurith and others are looking to drug courts-- special judicial arenas that
give judges more flexibility in sentencing. In drug court you could be sent
to rehab if you're an addict, or to boot camp if, like Jermel, you're a
low-level player.

You may avoid having a drug felony on your record; this type of felony can
make it hard to get a job or financial aid (drug felons are denied federal
grants for college; murderers and rapists aren't). If you blow rehab, you
may still go to prison, but jail is no longer the first stop.

System Failure

More than anything, Maggie Burleson wishes her son Jeffrey, now 19, could
have landed in drug court.

Growing up in Michigan and Florida, Jeffrey, who's white, started using
drugs at age nine. He's been diagnosed with bipolar and attention deficit
hyperactive disorders, his mom says; at the beginning, he'd resort to drugs
like crack, speed and pot to help him cope with depression and anxiety.

Jeffrey's problems with the law started early--his long rap sheet includes
truancy, grand-theft auto and burglary (though none of his crimes were
violent). Although he'd steal to pay for crack, he was never arrested on a
drug charge.

And Maggie wishes he had been. He might have been sent to drug court early
on and had treatment. "All we wanted was to get Jeffrey in to rehab," she
says. Finally, when Jeffrey was 17, he admitted he needed help. Maggie
found him a bed in a rehab center.

Two days later, he was arrested for a burglary he'd committed some weeks
earlier. Jeffrey got six years in a maximum-security Florida prison. He's
not in drug rehab, though he wants it. "He's becoming hard," says Maggie.
"The system manufactures criminals."

That's something politicians are starting to understand, which partly
explains why the number of drug courts across the nation has grown from 12
to 700 in seven years.

New York's Republican governor, George Pataki, is talking about amending
the Rockefeller laws. Last year five states all passed ballot initiatives
related to drug policy reform.

Religious leaders, like William Skylstad, the Catholic bishop of Spokane,
are demanding change. Gary Johnson, New Mexico's Republican governor, has
called for legalizing some drugs. "Drugs account for half of law
enforcement spending," he has said. "We are arresting 1.6 million people a
year on drug-related charges and it's a failure."

Undoing Addiction

But rehab works, as 23-year-old Debbie Walcott knows.

At 17, Debbie was taking everything from ecstasy to GHB to coke to heroin.
"I was an addict," she says matter-of-factly in her Long Island, New York,
accent. To support her habit, Debbie danced topless and stole from the
pharmacy where she worked.

She got caught, was charged with grand larceny and given three years'
probation.

But Debbie went on doing drugs, hiding it from her probation officer, until
eventually she failed a drug test, went to drug court and was given a
choice: full-time rehab or jail. She chose rehab and has lived at a local
campus of Phoenix House--a nonprofit treatment center operating in eight
states--for more than a year. Phoenix House is no summer camp. Initially
Debbie's every move was scheduled and monitored; she couldn't leave or make
phone calls; she had to work. But she got intensive treatment--therapy,
vocational training, life-skill workshops--and as she improved, she won
privileges. Debbie is still at Phoenix House, finishing her treatment,
except that now she volunteers for AmeriCorps, working with others just
entering rehab. When she's done, she'll have earned several thousand
dollars toward school and veterinary-technician studies. She's a poster
girl for why treatment works. "Look," says Mitchell S. Rosenthal, M.D.,
president of Phoenix House. "If people are simply in custody, where
there's no process for helping them to know themselves, to transform
themselves, they're going to get out in the same shape they went in, or worse."

Rehab is also economical: One study has shown that for every dollar spent
on drug treatment, taxpayers save seven on crime-related spending. It
remains to be seen whether the new presidential administration will take
these findings into account. "A lot of people are coming to the
realization that long minimum sentences for first-time users may not be the
best way to occupy jail space or heal people from their
disease." President Bush said in January. "And I'm willing to look at
that." However, his new attorney general, John Ashcroft, who helps decide
drug policy, has said he wants to make "reinvigorating the drug war" a top
priority, including keeping mandatory minimums.

Roshica is not thinking about the future of drug policy. Sitting in the
Kingston courtroom, she's waiting to see if she's going back to jail. When
the judge gives the good news -- Roshica will be resentenced as a youthful
offender., her felony record sealed -- Roshica's mom breaks down in
tears. Roshica thanks the judge, but it's not over yet. She still has
four years probation: if she gets in trouble, she could land back in
prison. But she plans to take advantage of her freedom by getting her GED
and going to cosmetology school. As a smile spreads across her face, she
says, "I just got my life back."