HARD TIME FOR SOFT CRIMES

In Philadelphia in 1790, not too far from the site of next week's
Republican National Convention, the state of Pennsylvania inaugurated an
American experiment: the Walnut Street Penitentiary. It was the first
modern prison, and it replaced the stocks, the gallows and beatings with
solitary confinement and enforced silence.

I doubt any convention speakers will invoke the Walnut Street Penitentiary
from the convention platform. They'll probably stick to the Liberty Bell
and Ben Franklin. But the original American prison might be the better
symbol, as a national study released Thursday by a Washington
criminal-justice think tank makes clear.

"Poor Prescription: the Costs of Imprisoning Drug Offenders in the United
States," published by the Justice Policy Institute reveals in stark terms
the consequences of the bipartisan, two-decade love affair with mandatory
sentences and harsh drug policies. The nation's prison population now
stands at 2 million, but according to the report, this has less to do with
making streets safer than with locking up nonviolent drug users.

According to the Justice Policy Institute study, while the number of people
in state prisons for violent crime has doubled since 1980, the number of
nonviolent offenders behind bars has tripled -- and the number of people
incarcerated for drug offenses has gone up more than 11-fold.

Appearing on the eve of the Republican convention, the Justice Policy
Institute's study also underscores a historic irony: In many cases it is
Republicans, not Democrats, who are beginning to ask the hard questions
about the drug war -- including some prominent Republican officials who
will be descending on Philadelphia.

One of them is California Rep. Tom Campbell of Silicon Valley, who took
part in the Justice Policy Institute's press conference on the study.
Campbell, now running for Senate against ardent drug-warrior Democrat
Dianne Feinstein is by his own admission, "pretty far out there" in
traditional Republican terms, arguing for medicinal marijuana, treatment in
place of prison and Zurich-style experiments with supplying addicts with
their fix. Campbell will address the alternative "Shadow Convention" on
Tuesday about the drug war issue.

But while he is a maverick, Campbell is not as isolated as he would have
been, say, at the last Republican National Convention. Just as it was
Republican Gov. George Ryan of Illinois who imposed the first death penalty
moratorium, recently a handful of Republican leaders have taken more than
tentative steps into drug reform terrain, which until now was considered
off-limits to any serious politician.

Michigan's Republican governor, John Engler, for instance, has endorsed
modifying his state's mandatory sentencing for drug offenders. New York
Gov. George Pataki talks openly of reforming the state's notorious
Rockefeller drug laws, responsible for one-third of all New York prisoners
and the archetype for a generation of punitive drug laws nationwide. New
Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson supports the legalization of medicinal marijuana
and turning from prison to treatment programs for addicts. Even
Pennsylvania's Arlen Specter, a former prosecutor, has taken the first
steps toward questioning the national drug strategy -- defying GOP
leadership to vote against a massive military aid bill for Columbia.

How has the party of law-and-order Reaganism suddenly turned into a forum
for debate over drug policy?

"In part, there is an intellectual tradition which has paved the way," says
Ethan Nadelman of the Lindesmith Center, the leading drug-policy reform
think tank. "There is a libertarian streak in the Republican Party which
has always favored a different approach." Nobel laureate Milton Friedman,
columnist William F. Buckley and former Secretary of State George Shultz
have all denounced the drug war as an infringement on individual freedom
and choice.

But the small cadre of new GOP drug reformers like Campbell and Johnson
represent a new phenomenon. "I am not coming at this as a libertarian,"
says Campbell. "I am a traditional Republican in that I value smaller
government, limited government, and the drug war seems the opposite of
that. But what really persuades me, candidly, is the pragmatics of it."

Campbell remembers voting in 1988 -- his first term in Congress -- for a
bill that tried to combine cocaine interdiction with subsidizing imports of
Latin American flowers -- hoping to convert growers from coke to blossoms.
"I was full of optimism, even though flower growers in my district were
furious. But you know what happened? Flower imports increased -- but so did
coke. Interdiction is a losing game. Extermination of the drug crop is a
losing game."

Campbell began to rethink his drug-policy position almost by accident. A
former law professor interested in tort reform, he began studying research
by the Rand Corp. Some of Rand's litigation-reform experts were also
looking at drug policy. "I became convinced that the drug war as we know it
now is a dead end. It comes down to this: Do we want to get people off
drugs, or do we want them in jail? Do we want to reduce violent crime? Then
we've got to take away the incentive for violence, for getting the money to
buy drugs or for fighting over turf to sell it."

The Democrats, of course, have their drug reformers. John Conyers of
Michigan, ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, last week
proposed federal funding for states that seek to divert nonviolent drug
offenders into treatment instead of prison. "The federal government must
support alternatives to wholesale incarceration," he says. And Sen. Patrick
Leahy of Vermont has promised that if Democrats win the Senate and he
becomes chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he'll make drug reform
a priority. But at the national level, few Democrats are as outspoken as
the most prominent Republican drug reformers. The risk of being seen as
soft on crime, or as a 1960s counterculture holdover, seems too great for
many Democratic politicians. And they would be fighting their own
president's administration: Drug czar Barry McCaffrey has fought harm
reduction at every turn, even pressuring Health and Human Services
Secretary Donna Shalala into abandoning a planned endorsement of needle
exchange programs.

In other words, says Vincent Schiraldi, director of the Justice Policy
Institute and one of the authors of the new report: "Nixon can go to China
on this one."

Going state by state, the Justice Policy Institute report contains some
shockers about Republican and Democratic administrations alike.

It turns out, for instance, that when it comes to harsh drug policy, the
frontier justice of George W. Bush's Texas can't hold a candle to
California, which locks up a higher percentage of its citizens for drug
offenses than any other state: The number of Californians incarcerated for
drug crimes has gone up 25 times in 20 years, to 44,000 -- twice the
state's entire prison population in 1980.

On the other hand, Texas comes off as a particularly horrifying place for
racially biased drug laws. Although survey after survey shows that whites
and African-Americans use drugs at about the same rate, in Texas and other
states Schiraldi's team surveyed -- Hawaii, South Carolina, North Carolina,
Maine and Virginia -- drug imprisonment for whites fell over the last
decade while incarceration of black drug users rose two to eight times.

"That was stunning, even to me," Schiraldi admits. "We expected to see
blacks going to prison in larger numbers, but to find so many places where
white drug incarceration fell at the same time -- that's a new floor."

Nearly 1 in 4 people in prison in the United States, the survey finds, is
there for a drug offense -- and the number of drug offenders locked up
today "is roughly the same as the entire prison and jail population in 1980."

As Republicans gather in the city that gave birth to the penitentiary, here
is something to ponder. In the early 1970s when Al Gore was in Vietnam, and
when George W. Bush was flying planes around Texas to avoid Vietnam, the
nation's prison population stood at 200,000. Back then that number was a
big deal: Prison riots in New York and California made the front page,
books about prison life made the bestseller list.

Today, the prison population stands at 2 million. As Schiraldi says, "We've
got a population the size of Washington, D.C., locked up for drug offenses
alone." The war on drugs is increasingly looking like this generation's
Vietnam. But the war in Vietnam, which shaped the lives of this year's
candidates, was at least debated at the conventions of 1972. About this
decade's war, however, the silence inside the convention halls of
Republicans and Democrats alike is deafening.