THE WORST DRUG LAWS

Adrian Wilson can't make a lobbying trip to Albany anytime soon: The
New York State Department of Corrections does not escort its prisoners
to the state capital for teach-ins. But his story--typical of the
22,000 nonviolent drug offenders in New York's cellblocks on any given
day--could serve as the centerpiece of the campaign now under way for
the long-overdue repeal of the notoriously punitive Rockefeller drug
laws. In 1983 Wilson, an African-American, then 29, was arrested for
drug possession--his first offense--and prosecutors offered him a plea
bargain that would have required him to undergo electroshock
treatments and eight months' incarceration. Wilson chose instead to
exercise his constitutional right to a trial. Convicted of possessing
four ounces of cocaine, instead of eight months he faced a mandatory
prison term of fifteen years to life.

No single moment in the history of US criminal justice matches the
destructive impact of the New York legislature's 1973 session. That
was when Governor Nelson Rockefeller set the tone for a national wave
of prison-packing schemes with the drug laws that bear his name. As
Wilson's case illustrates, the Rockefeller drug laws combined two
regressive criminal justice policies into a new and potent brew: They
prescribe imprisonment rather than treatment for drug offenders, and
they establish mandatory minimum sentences and give the power to
decide sentences to the prosecutors, who choose charges, rather than
to the judges hearing cases.

The outcome, repeated thousands of times daily around the country:
Nonviolent drug offenders like Wilson get punished not in proportion
to any presumed threat to society but for daring to inconvenience
prosecutors with a trial. With built-in incentives for police and
prosecutors to concentrate on low-level users and with racial
discrimination an inevitability, the Rockefeller drug laws are the
ancestor of just about every regressive criminal justice policy since
enacted--three-strikes laws, federal sentencing guidelines and
zero-tolerance police sweeps.

With the cost for imprisoning Rockefeller drug offenders topping $ 710
million per year, Governor George Pataki has at last proposed a
package of reforms reducing minimum drug sentences and expanding
treatment. Assembly Democrats--many of whom have dodged the issue for
years until Pataki opened the door--have upped the ante, proposing
more sweeping discretion for judges and more money for drug treatment.
The Correctional Association of New York and a broad array of
activist, religious and legal-reform groups have launched a Drop the
Rock campaign (kicked off with a March 1 forum in Manhattan
co-sponsored by the Nation Institute), which on March 27 will bring
thousands to Albany for a day of teach-ins and citizen lobbying. Only
a handful of district attorneys, worried about losing their sentencing
leverage in plea bargains, are holding out for the Rockefeller status
quo.

So the question is not whether New York will reform but if reform will
go far enough. Pataki's plan would not give judges any more discretion
for Class B felonies, the most commonly charged drug offenses in New
York, and would actually increase some minimum sentences. Pataki would
allow prosecutors to handpick the offenders tracked into treatment--a
certain recipe for abuse and another usurpation of the proper
authority of judges. Perhaps most important, Pataki has so far come
nowhere near proposing a budget for drug treatment commensurate with
the need. Drug-law reform without a commitment to drug treatment is a
half-measure, similar to the 1980s deinstitutionalization of
psychiatric patients with no system of community mental healthcare in
place.

New York, which for years styled itself as a pioneer in criminal
justice policy, is now playing catch-up to states like California,
whose voters last November overwhelmingly approved a
treatment-over-prison referendum for first- and second-time offenders,
or Colorado and Nevada, which have passed medical-marijuana measures.
But the Rockefeller laws are the founding charter of the failed war on
drugs, and their repeal would turn state reform tremors into an
American earthquake. In immediate impact on the lives of the poor and
people of color, and as a long-term shift in national priorities,
there will be no more important campaign this year. It's time to Drop
the Rock.