DRUG WAR ONLY PRODUCES CASUALTIES

Drug war only produces casualties Abuse prevention and treatment a
smarter approach than shattering people's lives by filling our prisons
more than any other nation, says Neal Peirce .

In a few short days, on Feb. 15, America moves past the 2 million mark
in the number of people incarcerated in its prisons and jails.

That's the estimate of the Justice Policy Institute, a nonprofit
research group that advocates alternatives to incarceration. No one
seems to dispute its figures.

Two million represents a fivefold increase over this nation's 1972
prison population. Or check back to 1910: for every 100,000 Americans
then, 122 were imprisoned. Today the figure is 724 inmates for every
100,000. We've passed Russia as the world's incarceration leader.
We're putting people behind bars at six to 10 times the rate of other
industrialized nations.

Clearly, there's something desperately wrong when a powerful nation,
respected globally and swimming in economic ebullience, feels obliged
to deny freedom to so many of its own people.

But to President Clinton, in his almost euphoric State of the Union
address, the incarceration craze was a nonissue. Ditto the nation's
governors, except for a few who referred to crime prevention in their
state of the state addresses.

Even in the media-intense presidential campaign, Texas Gov. George W.
Bush has faced few questions about the incredibly rapid expansion of
Texas prison slots -- from 41,000 to 150,000 -- since he took office.

For 20 years, courts have sought to force humane standards on Texas
prisons. In refusing to lift the controls, a federal judge recently
ruled that Texas inmates face an unacceptable threat of violence,
living in "a fear that is incomprehensible to most of the state's
free-world citizens."

Is that "compassionate conservatism"?

There are also ugly racial overtones, so popular with politicos
anxious to show their "toughness" on crime. Blacks represent about 13
percent of the nation's population and 15 percent of its drug users,
but about 50 percent of prison inmates in an era when drug offenses
have been the driving force in prison expansion.

Blacks suffer from gross sentencing disparity. The powder form of
cocaine preferred by wealthier, usually white consumers requires 100
times as much weight to trigger the same penalty as the crack form.
Crack users were originally thought to be beyond help, but recent
studies show crack is less addictive than nicotine, and treatable.

Yet Congress refuses to change the law to comparable penalties. Is
that "equal protection of the laws"?

Some 1.4 million black men, or 13 percent of the adult male
population, have lost their right to vote because of involvement with
the criminal justice system. One study, based on 1996 figures, found
more blacks in prison than in universities.

The United States' "War on Drugs" juggernaut also catches whites and
Hispanics, condemning hundreds of thousands of small-time addicts and
street dealers of all backgrounds to years behind bars, away from
productive employment, their families and children.

Yet there's little public outcry, little demand for
justice.

So, have today's harsh penalties helped drive down the crime
rate?

Well, maybe a little. Take habitual offenders and put them under tight
supervision -- in prison, or on probation -- and it follows that crime
will drop (temporarily, at least).

But New York had the country's second slowest growing prison
population when it experienced sensational drops in homicides and
other violent crimes in the mid-to-late '90s. California, by contrast,
was adding inmates wildly, and its violent crime rates dropped much
more slowly.

Bottom line: There's little correlation between incarceration and
crime rates.

Few people oppose hunting down, prosecuting and imprisoning truly
violent and incorrigible criminals. Yet as Marc Mauer showed in his
1999 book, "Race to Incarcerate," despite three decades of ballooning
prison populations, crime rates, before and after the prison buildup,
were about the same.

Just look back past the bulge of the crack epidemic, notes Lynn Curtis
of the Eisenhower Foundation, and the lack of progress is apparent:
"We have a policy that not only doesn't work but breeds more and more
destruction."

And it's the nature of that destruction -- the pursuit of legions of
nonviolent, petty offenders -- that has made war zones of so many
inner-city neighborhoods, decimated families, compromised police, and
still besmirches American democracy as we enter this new century.

The key words for these times need to be prevention, treatment,
outreach to the imperiled communities. Yet our official dollars for
treatment are paltry, spasmodic and insufficient.

We could do better. In 1966, notes San Diego Union-Tribune columnist
Richard Louv, Arizona voters passed an initiative mandating treatment
instead of prison for nonviolent drug offenders. In 1998 they passed
it again, overriding their state Legislature's attempt to kill it.

It turns out more than three-quarters of the Arizona offenders have
tested drug-free at the end of their treatment programs. And they're
not in prison.

Couldn't we collectively, as a nation, get so smart?