DRUG LAWS THAT DESTROY LIVES

New York State's inflexibly draconian drug laws, enacted under Gov. Nelson
Rockefeller in 1973, have helped propel the state prison population to a
fivefold increase between then and 1999. Some 22,300 drug offenders are
currently confined in state prisons.

Many of these inmates are nonviolent users or small-time sellers who were
dispensing drugs to support their own addictions. The annual budget cost of
this incarceration is a staggering $700 million.

But the human costs are even more horrendous. Excessive prison sentences
destroy families for no good reason and prevent nonviolent offenders from
leading productive lives.

Thousands of inmates are in prison who could be effectively rehabilitated
with drug treatment.

Thousands of children whose parents have been sentenced to inappropriately
long terms have spent their childhoods in the costly, often callous foster
care system. It is time Gov. George Pataki and the State Legislature put an
end to decades of waste by repealing these laws.

It is not enough that, nearly every holiday season, Governor Pataki shows
mercy to a few prisoners who have been caught by drug laws that impose
mandatory minimum sentences of 15 years to life on offenders convicted of
selling as little as two ounces, or possessing as little as four ounces, of
cocaine or heroin.

Last Christmas he commuted the sentences of four inmates, all of whom were
first-time, nonviolent drug offenders who had been sentenced to either 15
or 20 years to life.

But these isolated gestures of mercy cannot begin to cure an inflexible and
irrational system in which nonviolent drug offenders are being sentenced to
terms longer than those imposed on rapists and other violent criminals.

The solution is to abolish these laws and give judges discretion at
sentencing to consider the circumstances of the crime and the offender's
background.

The unfairness of the Rockefeller laws can be seen in the cases of Donna
Charles and Leah Bundy, two women who are serving time under these laws,
though good social policy would have allowed their release years ago.

Ms. Charles had never been in trouble with the law before her drug arrest.
But desperate for money to rent an apartment after she and her children
found themselves essentially homeless, she agreed to carry a package of
cocaine to Memphis for a drug dealer.

She was arrested at La Guardia Airport. She was offered a plea bargain of
three years to life for criminal possession, but chose to go to trial, and
was convicted and sentenced to 17 years to life in 1987. She left behind
two young children, who have spent their childhoods farmed out to family
friends and in foster care. Even the judge who sentenced her recently
pleaded for clemency on her behalf.

Ms. Bundy was also convicted of criminal possession. She was in her
boyfriend's apartment when the police raided the unit and found drugs. She
went to trial and was sentenced to 15 years to life. She was then 21 years
old, and her children were 1, 2 and 3 years old. In the nine years that she
has been in prison, her children have been in foster care and informal care
arrangements. Her rehabilitation has been so impressive that Joseph Bruno,
the State Senate majority leader, lobbied for clemency on her behalf to
Governor Pataki last year, but her clemency request has not been granted.

Thousands of other inmates are in the prison system under another
Rockefeller-era law that applies to second-time offenders.

Those offenders face a mandatory minimum sentence of four and a half years
for selling as little as $10 worth of cocaine.

Many are small-time dealers who sell drugs to support their addictions, and
most never go through drug treatment.

Yet these offenders are filling the court dockets and prison cells when
they could be rehabilitated through treatment programs and other less
costly alternatives to incarceration.

Governor Pataki and leaders like Mr. Bruno should show some common sense by
repealing these outmoded laws and restoring rationality to drug sentences.

The fortunate few who have won clemency leave behind tens of thousands of
others incarcerated by a system of unjust laws.