THE HARM IN MANDATORY SENTENCES

We now have another horror story of someone being sacrificed on the altar
of mandatory minimum sentences and federal sentencing guidelines, and once
again, the sacrifice is for the sake of the war on drugs, the greatest
domestic stupidity since Prohibition.

According to a detailed account in Sunday's Washington Post, Kemba Smith,
28, grew up in a protective, perhaps overly protective, middle-class home
outside Richmond. The abusive childhood that is standard lore in the tawdry
biographies of most criminals does not appear in Smith's story. According
to the article by Libby Copeland, Smith entered Hampton-Sidney University
in 1989 and fell in with a fast crowd. By the middle of her sophomore year,
she was dating a Jamaican named Peter Hall, not knowing he'd been using the
campus as a base for his drug operation for two years. In July, he beat her
and tried to strangle her. Then, he comforted her. The all-too-familiar
cycle of domestic abuse started, and Smith never escaped. She loved him;
she feared him. By the summer of 1992, she was carrying Hall's gun in her
purse. She flew to New York with money strapped to her body, she rode to
Charlotte in a van carrying cocaine, though she says she didn't know it was
there.

In May 1993, Hall murdered a friend he thought was cooperating with federal
agents, and Kemba helped in the getaway--again unwittingly. Later, he told
her what he had done. At Hall's instruction, she met with agents and fed
them lies, even after they offered her immunity. She went on the run with
him for nine months. Pregnant, she finally bailed out, returned to
Richmond, found that there was a warrant for her arrest and surrendered on
Sept. 1, 1994. Later that month, when federal agents tried to find out
where Hall was, she lied again. By the time she agreed to cooperate, Hall
was dead, and so was any chance of her getting a deal. She pleaded guilty
to conspiracy to trafficking 255 kilograms of cocaine. The quantity
triggered a minimum 20-year prison sentence. In addition, she pleaded
guilty to money laundering and making false statements to federal agents.
She was sentenced to 24 1/2 years in prison, even though she never sold any
dope.

Smith was a first-time offender and a nonviolent one. No question she did
wrong, no question either, for anyone who knows about domestic abuse, that
she felt fear. The appeals judge who recently rejected her appeal described
the sentence as "a truly heavy sentence," but his hands were tied by the
federal sentencing rules. Smith's 5-year-old son is being raised by her
parents.

Congress responded to the crack cocaine epidemic of the mid-1980s with the
kind of draconian measures we would expect from a body that knee-jerks its
way through maddening problems of race, crime, teenage pregnancy and
grinding poverty. We're spending $16 billion a year on the war on drugs,
and the prison population has gone from under three-quarters of a million
in the mid-'80s to 2 million now. The Federal Bureau of Prisons budget
jumped from $220 million in 1986 to a projected $3.8 billion for 2000. Drug
offenders are the vast majority of new inmates. The only way to get around
the onerous sentences is to trade information to prosecutors. The kingpins
have the information to trade. The mules don't. So guess who is in the
slammer?

This has all been a boon to the penal industry and to lawyers who defend
and prosecute dealers, but it has not made a dent in the availability of
drugs or drug use.

A few politicians are starting to attack the war on drugs as a failure, the
most recent being New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson (R), who likens it to the
Berlin Wall: "You're going to get a critical mass here, and all of a sudden
it's just going to topple." With billions at stake every year in the drug
war, however, it is going to take the hardliners, the ones with impeccable
credentials, to reverse strategy. It was President Richard M. Nixon who
opened the door to new relations with communist China.

Interdiction, for example, has proven to be a joke. Treatment is eight
times more cost-effective than long sentences in removing cocaine from the
market. Distinctions ought to be made between drugs: Blowing pot is
probably less harmful to the person and to society than alcohol. Drunk
drivers cause far more accidents that stoned drivers.

The war on drugs, like the war in Vietnam, never had achievable goals.
Drugs are always going to be with us, and what we ought to be doing is
finding ways to minimize the harm they cause individuals and society. We
should be talking about legalizing certain drugs, selling them and taxing
just like we do cigarettes and alcohol, standardizing content and
regulating distribution. You can put the Peter Halls out of business by
taking over the business.

Sen. Spencer Abraham (R-Mich.) is a perfect example of the wrongheadedness
that continues to dominate Congress. He's gotten an amendment passed on the
Senate bankruptcy bill that would double the mandatory minimum to 10 years
for having 500 grams of powder cocaine. He needs to get a clue about drugs:
Kingpins don't traffic in quantities of 500 grams.

Mandatory minimum prison sentences were applied in 64 percent of drug cases
in 1998. The average length of imprisonment for drug offenses was 76
months; for firearms violations it was 63 months; and for manslaughter, it
was 45 months. To put what happened to Kemba Smith in perspective--which
the judicial system wasn't able to do--the average prison time for a
murderer is 20 years.

Her sentence isn't justice: It's a cruel caprice.

Kemba Smith, like an awful lot of young women, fell for the wrong guy and
for whatever reason, didn't get out. She was naive. She showed terrible
judgment. She's not all that unusual. In fact, she could be our daughter.