FED DRUG CONVICTIONS ARE SHOWING A DECLINE

Are we winning the war against drugs? It's much too early to tell, but we
appear to be making some progress.

Prison sentences for those convicted of federal drug crimes declined
significantly over the past six years, according to data received from the
Justice Department, the Administrative Office of the Courts and the U.S.
Sentencing Commission.

Data from the Department of the Executive Office for the U.S. Attorney,
obtained by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse under the Freedom
of Information Act, showed that the average federal drug sentence went from
86 months in 1992 to just 67 months in 1998, a drop of 22 percent.

Similar but less precipitous declines were registered by the Courts and
Sentencing Commission. Although definitional differences used in gathering
the statistics by the three organizations were not the same, the parallel
trends in the data strengthen the conclusion that federal drug sentences are
substantially down.

The decline appears to have begun during the last year of the Bush
administration and continued during the Clinton years. Several factors
explain the drop. Federal prosecutors, for example, may be persuading more
drug defendants to cooperate.

Under the sentencing guidelines, defendants who provide useful information
usually get less time. Another contributing factor might be Congress'
approval in 1994 of the so-called "safety valve" law giving judges more
flexibility in the sentencing of low-level drug defendants.

During the same 1992-98 period that sentences were moving lower, the number
of federal drug prosecutions by all federal agencies dipped and then rose.
The 21,571 federal drug convictions in fiscal year 1998 appear to represent
an all-time high.

For all federal agencies, marijuana was involved in more 1998 convictions
than any other single drug, with powder cocaine and crack cocaine coming in
second and third. The percentages were marijuana (34 percent), powder
cocaine (28 percent) and crack cocaine (17 percent).

Selected Drug Enforcement Administration enforcement indicators were mixed.
The proportion of DEA prosecutions resulting in conviction was up, 81
percent in 1998 compared with 75 percent in 1992. The trends in DEA
sentences, however, were down. Averages declined to 75 months in 1998 from
94 months in 1992. Median DEA sentences -- half got more, half got less --
were also down.

Long-term data about the U.S. Customs Service show that from 1981 to 1998,
the agency racked up a dramatic 13-fold increase in convictions, largely
because of its intense focus on drugs.

This sharp increase in Customs enforcement activities means the agency now
ranks No. 2 in the federal government in drug prosecutions, trailing only
the DEA. In fact, the 1998 Customs total of 4,730 drug convictions was
slightly more than the combined total achieved by the FBI, the Bureau of
Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms, the Immigration and Naturalization Service and
the Internal Revenue Service.