TO HELP THE NYPD, END THE ROCKEFELLER DRUG LAWS

The New York Police Department now seems likely to be overseen by a federal
monitor because of charges of police brutality. But police brutality is only
the most dramatic and visible piece of a larger, more insidious problem.

Police sent into low-income, inner-city communities on drug sweeps have
become agents of a crimefighting approach that does far more damage to those
communities than most people realize.

Particular statutes on the books in New York, primarily the Rockefeller drug
laws, foster pernicious kinds of police tactics. These laws mandate prison
sentences for even low-level drug offenses and base the criterion for guilt
on the amount of drugs one possesses, rather than one's role in a drug
transaction.

In reality, these laws foster indiscriminate drug sweeps and quality-of-life
crackdowns because they enable the law enforcement apparatus to rack up high
numbers of cases that result in jail time. In turn, those numbers guarantee
a payoff for the political leaders whose careers are advanced because they
are able to claim they have reduced crime. So even if the police were models
of Emily Post -- considered and even-handed in their actions and responses
- -- government officials would still direct them to implement the misguided
policies of the so-called war on drugs.

Passed in 1973, when Nelson Rockefeller was governor, New York's drug laws
are marked by racial bias. Studies show that most of those who use drugs are
white, but the vast majority of inmates doing time in New York for the sale
or possession of narcotics are African-American or Latino; more than 94%, in
fact.

The drug laws, and the police and prosecutorial practices that enforce them,
lead to a kind of racial profiling that is devastating to minority
neighborhoods: The state uproots individuals and ships them hundreds of
miles upstate to prison warehouses. They return years later, bitter and
debilitated, with few employable skills, stigmatized as ex-convicts,
ill-equipped to make a crime-free adjustment to their community.

New York's drug laws impose penalties without regard to the circumstances of
the offense or the individual's character or background. Some New Yorkers in
state prison today with more than a decade of hard time behind them -- even
for first-time offenses -- were convicted simply as drug couriers who had no
criminal history.

Murderers, arsonists and kidnappers face the same penalty as these drug
mules, while rape, the sexual abuse of a child and armed robbery carry
lesser sanctions.

Major dealers often take advantage of a drug law provision that has them
serve only lifetime probation if they turn in other drug offenders. Because
the less culpable generally don't have information useful to prosecutors,
they often refuse plea bargains and insist on trials. Then, if found guilty,
they are frequently sentenced to mandatory minimum terms of 15 years to
life.

The pattern is pernicious: Law enforcement focuses on the minor actors for
whom treatment is often more appropriate, rather than on the higher-level
criminals who are the drug trade's masterminds and profiteers.

These laws have also had an adverse effect on New York's budget and prison
system. There are nearly 22,300 drug offenders in the state prison system,
about 30% of the inmate population. Operating the prisons that hold these
offenders costs the state more than $710 million a year. The state now
spends far more annually on prisons than higher education. As a result of
these skewed priorities, more African-Americans and Latinos enter prison
each year on drug charges than graduate from the state's public colleges.

Despite enormous expenditures, New York's prisons are hobbled by crisis
conditions. Institutions are crowded -- the system has been forced to
double-bunk or double-cell more than 12,000 inmates -- and there are not
enough programs to occupy inmates productively.

The solutions are clear. We must reform the police conduct that disrespects
and sometimes brutalizes citizens. And our politicians must summon the
courage to fix the policies that drive that disreputable conduct, the laws
that mandate a heedless government practice of punitive confinement.