REPUBLICANS, IN THEIR OWN DRUG BILL, SEEK MORE TREATMENT FOR THE NONVIOLENT

ALBANY, March 14 — Senate Republican leaders weighed in today on the debate
over drug offenders with a $20 million proposal to expand treatment
programs for nonviolent drug felons.

The measure, announced by the Senate majority leader, Joseph L. Bruno, at a
news conference this afternoon, would allow prosecutors to send drug
offenders with substance abuse problems to treatment instead of to prison.
The money would cover an 18- to 24-month treatment program for about 800
felons a year and would finance the creation of additional treatment slots
in the state prison system, job training for incarcerated drug offenders
and treatment options after prison.

The Senate proposal does not directly address the efforts by the governor
and the Democratic leadership of the Assembly to ease the state's stringent
mandatory drug-sentencing laws. Mr. Bruno said today that he was reviewing
the proposals, but would not talk about them.

The Senate proposal says nothing about the range of mandatory sentences,
nor about whether judicial discretion ought to be expanded — the two most
contentious issues in drug law reform, both of them vigorously opposed by
prosecutors. Instead it focuses strictly on expanding treatment for
criminals who are, as Mr. Bruno put it, "alcoholics and people who are
drug-afflicted."

Under the state's Rockefeller-era drug laws, judges must abide by a range
of minimum and maximum prison terms, based on the weight of the drugs
seized on the defendants and their prior felony records. After years of
public pressure to soften those laws, Democrats and Republicans seem poised
to make some changes this year, though differences among them remain.

The governor's bill would reduce some of the mandatory minimum sentences
and offer judges slightly more discretion over sentencing. The Assembly's
proposal would provide more judicial discretion and would lower mandatory
minimum sentences even further. The Assembly also seeks to expand treatment
places by using savings from the decline in the prison population; it
proposes to use 75 percent of an estimated $160 million in annual savings
to develop 2,000 treatment slots.