CRIME BILL RAISES ALARMS

Drug Sentencing. U.S.-Style Crackdown Doomed To Fail, Critics Say

Ten years ago, Karen Garrison watched as her twin sons were locked up
in prison, for longer than she ever thought possible.

Lamont and Lawrence, then 25, had just graduated from university in
Washington, D.C. They had no prior record. They wanted to become
lawyers. Instead, they were sent to jail for 15 and 19 years apiece,
for conspiring to sell crack cocaine.

The judge had no say in their punishment. Tough mandatory minimum
sentences, crafted in 1986 at the height of the U.S. war on drugs,
meant the Garrisons would go to prison, without parole, for many years.

After a decade of heartache, and with her sons still serving time,
Garrison has a warning for Canada: "Be careful with these mandatory
minimums - the punishment doesn't often fit the crime," she says. "It
can destroy families." In November, the Harper government introduced
legislation to create Canada's first mandatory minimum sentences for
drug trafficking. Bill C-26, now before Parliament, would
automatically send people to jail for fixed terms of six months to
three years for selling even small amounts of marijuana, cocaine,
heroin and other drugs.

Such changes - Canada currently has no mandatory minimum penalties
for drug crimes - fly in the face of almost all expert advice,
including two internal reports produced by the Justice Department itself.

The Conservatives are also pushing ahead with Bill C-26 at the very
moment the United States is repealing or reforming many of its own
mandatory minimum drug penalties, because of mounting evidence that
they don't work.

From California to Connecticut, state governments are rolling back
mandatory sentences in favour of more nuanced rules allowing
low-level street dealers, for example, or non-violent offenders, to
enter addiction centres instead of prison, or to benefit from early parole.

Even at the federal level, where mandatory minimum drug laws remain
intact, some Washington lawmakers are calling for change.

Yet despite the reformist trend, there remains solid support for
mandatory minimums in many states.

In March, the U.S. Congress took the first step in reforming the
harsh sentencing regime for some crack cocaine offences, reducing
prison terms and making the changes retroactive - meaning thousands
of inmates, including the Garrison twins, may soon have years cut
from their sentences.

The Garrisons have always insisted on their innocence. No drugs,
weapons or wads of cash were found in their possession. But they were
convicted, along with a dozen others, after a witness implicated them
in the conspiracy.

Because of mandatory sentencing, neither the twins' clean records,
their employment history, nor the letters of praise from their
university professors, counted for anything.

"The mandatory minimums got 'em," says their mother, a former
aesthetician, who became an activist against such laws and now works
for Washington advocacy group Families Against Mandatory Minimums.

"Of course, every person who goes before a judge is not innocent,"
she says. "But with mandatory minimums, a judge can't look at a
person's history, their family support, the circumstances of their
crime, or whether they might be fathers or mothers with children at home.

"If the sentence is mandatory, everybody just goes to jail."
Mandatory drug penalties have helped turn the U.S. into the world's
leading jailer, with more than 2.3 million people in prison,
according to the International Centre for Prison Studies in London.

The U.S. also has the world's highest per capita rate of
incarceration - 751 people in jail for every 100,000 in population -
more than Russia at a rate of 627, China at 119 and Canada at 108.

In 2007, the U.S. also passed a sobering milestone: more than one of
every 100 adult Americans is now locked up in jail.

Mandatory drug laws contributed to this situation. Since 1980, the
number of Americans jailed for drug crimes has soared to 500,000 from
about 40,000.

The result is overcrowded prisons and overburdened corrections
budgets. But the biggest problem is the failure of such laws to
ensnare the criminals they're designed to target - the kingpins and
dealers at the top of the drug trade.

One reason is that prosecutors plea bargain away mandatory jail time
in return for information that might lead to other arrests, but only
mid-to-higher-level traffickers have information to trade. As a
result, it's low-level dealers and addicts on the street, without
information to share, who end up, bizarrely, with the mandatory sentences.

"Mandatory minimums are not an effective policy tool," says Peter
Reuter, co-director of the drug policy program at the Rand
Corporation, a non-profit think-tank. "It's hard to find any evidence
that the price of drugs has gone up, or availability has gone down,
thanks to these laws." Such evidence convinced dozens of state
governments in recent years to reform their sentencing rules in the
hopes of finding a more cost-effective approach to the problem.

In 2003, Michigan repealed almost all its mandatory minimum drug
penalties, including a notorious law that sent offenders to prison
for at least 20 years without parole for transporting 650 grams or
more of heroin or cocaine.

Since 2001, Hawaii, Texas, North Dakota, Indiana, New Mexico,
Louisiana, Connecticut, Maine and Washington state have also repealed
or softened the terms of their mandatory drug penalties, giving back
to judges some of the discretion they once had to fix appropriate
punishments to the circumstances of individual crimes.

There is also talk of change on the federal side, with at least seven
bills now before Congress to reform mandatory crack cocaine sentences.

All three remaining presidential candidates have also endorsed
mandatory sentencing reform for non-violent offenders.

Even former president Bill Clinton, whose administration oversaw the
massive rise in incarceration rates in the 1990s, said in a February
speech that most of the drug offenders who went to jail "should have
been let out a long time ago." Florida, however, still jails people
for 25 years, merely for possessing a bottle of Percocet pain pills
without a prescription.

New York maintains some of the toughest mandatory drug penalties in
the country - with nearly 40 per cent of its prison population made
up of drug offenders - despite years of pressure on lawmakers to
reform the law.

"Although I don't support the use of mandatory minimums for
entry-level drugs like marijuana, especially in small quantities, I
do support them for serious drugs like heroin, meth, LSD, cocaine and
crack," says Charles Stimson, a former state and federal prosecutor,
and now a legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation, a Washington think-tank.

"There's no magic bullet for drug crime. But there's also no doubt in
my mind that the use of mandatory minimums, when done properly and
fairly, helps reduce crime. I would urge Canada to use them." The
one- to three-year sentences required under Canada's Bill C-26 are a
long way from the 10- to 20-year penalties common in the U.S. But
critics say a mandatory minimum of any length would harm a low-level
offender imprisoned under such rules, while adding to the financial
burden of the prison system, and doing little to stem the drug trade.

"The only people these laws benefit are the politicians," says
Chrystal Weaver, a Florida accountant who has campaigned against
mandatory drug penalties in her state.

"People tend to vote for these things because they like politicians
who are tough on crime. But the devil is in the details. Mandatory
minimums don't make sense." "Canada should learn from America's
mistakes in the war on drugs and just say no to mandatory minimum
sentencing," said Julie Stewart, president of Families Against
Mandatory Minimums, in a letter to Stephen Harper last year, after
Bill C-26 was introduced.

"They are not a cure-all. Instead, they will create a whole new batch
of problems for Canadians everywhere."