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.