THE DRUG WAR'S COLOR LINE

Black Leaders Shift Stances On Sentencing

While on the Washington, DC, Superior Court in the eighties, Judge
Reggie Walton was known for imposing long sentences on the young black
offenders who came before him and for lecturing them about how they
had let down their community. As associate director of the drug czar's
office under William Bennett from 1989 to 1991, he rejected the pleas
of state and local authorities and anti-drug abuse activists to shift
funds into comprehensive prevention and treatment instead of policing
and prisons.

Back on the federal bench after his White House sojourn, however,
Walton saw low-level couriers, known as mules, getting longer
sentences than the drug kingpins, and his views began to change. "It
has to make you take a second look," he says. Increasingly interested
in sending low-level drug offenders to treatment instead of prison, he
became appalled at how few treatment slots were available.

Today, Walton says, his "thinking in reference to long prison
sentences has been tempered" because of the strong reaction from those
the law supposedly protects. "If the community feels laws are unfair -
as many in the black community feel about mandatory-minimum sentences
- - then policy-makers should reconsider the laws," he says. "The
community must respect laws. Otherwise, the laws will be
self-defeating."

Walton's shift reflects a larger change in views among
African-Americans on how best to deal with the drug problem. Seeing
the devastation that crack, heroin and other drugs brought, many in
the black community once favored harsh penalties for possession and
dealing; some members of the Congressional Black Caucus, for instance,
were strong supporters of the 1986 anti - drug abuse act that mandated
disproportionately long sentences for crack relative to powder
cocaine. But the impact of those policies, compounded by unfair
enforcement practices, has since caused many to change their minds.
While there is no one school of thought about drugs in the black
community (and while some black Americans still take a hard line on
drug penalties), a new consensus seems to be emerging.

Ending drug abuse is still a priority, but African-American leaders
have placed reform of racist policing and sentencing practices at the
forefront of their agenda, citing statistic after statistic on the
damaging effects of discriminatory law enforcement and
disproportionate penalties for crack offenses. Obviously, plenty of
whites use crack, but according to the 1996 "Keeping Score" report by
Drug Strategies, a Washington, DC - based research organization, "No
white person has ever been convicted of a crack offense in the federal
courts of Boston, Denver, Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas or Miami,"
Because of racial profiling, unwarranted traffic stops lead to more
searches and arrests of African-Americans. Police sweeps (sometimes
with the support of community residents) round up open-air drug
merchants in black neighborhoods, while many whites deal drugs indoors
and are comparatively unhampered. Moreover, prosecutors have great
sway over punishment because they can decide whether, where (state or
federal court) and for what (misdemeanor or felony, possession or
dealing) the suspects are charged. The enforcement disparity is so
great that even Clinton Administration drug czar Barry McCaffrey has
spoken out against it. Last year, in the NAACP's The Crisis, McCaffrey
wrote, "Fifteen percent of the nation's reported cocaine users are
African-American, but they comprise about 40 percent of the people
charged with powder cocaine violations and nearly 90 percent of those
convicted on crack cocaine charges."

A sense of outrage at this situation has been building among black
leaders as well as ordinary black people. Congressional Black Caucus
members are now spearheading the drive to reform the 1986 legislation
mandating the sentencing disparities. Harlem Democrat Charles Rangel,
among the law's original backers, is leading efforts to eliminate the
mandatory five-year penalty for first-time possession of crack cocaine
and the 100 - to -1 sentencing disparity between powder and crack
cocaine. Long a leader on drug issues on Capitol Hill, Rangel explains
that he voted for severe crack penalties well before the racist nature
of the law's implementation was apparent. "It's abundantly clear,"
Rangel said in an interview, "that it's time to equalize [the
penalties]. It's also clear that the harshness of the sentences and
their mandatory nature just don't work."

Black leaders have been slower to shift their stance on needle
exchange, even as AIDS has devastated parts of the black community.
Currently, although black people make up just 12 percent of the
population, the number of new HIV infections among African-Americans
is greater than the number of new cases among whites. In addition,
almost 75 percent of AIDS cases in which HIV infection comes through
intravenous drug use or sex with an IV drug user are among minorities,
according to figures from the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

Still, some significant voices once hostile to needle exchange have
recently thrown their support behind these programs. Like many others
in law enforcement, Hubert Williams, president of the Police
Foundation, a nonprofit organization that works to improve policing
through research and technical assistance, once believed needle
exchange encouraged IV drug use. But as he saw dirty needles
contribute to the spread of AIDS, Williams came to believe that clean
needles would save lives. "Our failure to adopt programs that work,
such as needle exchanges, has added to the epidemic of AIDS in this
country," he says.

Likewise, Dr. Beny Primm, executive director of the Addiction Research
and Treatment Corporation in New York City, says he was "unalterably
opposed to [exchanging] needles ten years ago." About four years ago,
he explains, he became supportive of needle and syringe programs "if -
that's if - they are properly administered."

Last year the Clinton Administration seemed poised to endorse needle
exchange. Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala announced,
"A meticulous scientific review has now proven that needle-exchange
programs can reduce the transmission of HIV and save lives without
losing ground in the battle against illegal drugs." The review also
found that needle exchanges met the two conditions required for a ban
on federal funding to be lifted: The programs help reduce the spread
of HIV and do not encourage drug use.

Yet the White House refused to permit federal spending on the
programs, a position blasted by the Congressional Black Caucus.
Representative Maxine Waters, the Los Angeles Democrat who then
chaired the caucus, issued a statement calling on Clinton "to reverse
this wrongheaded decision." The caucus complained that the
Administration chose "to put politics ahead of science and sound
public policy." A letter to Clinton signed by most black House members
argued that "African-American and other minorities will suffer most
from this decision," because "minorities are disproportionately
affected by HIV/AIDS."

As the Police Foundation's Williams points out, however, not everyone
in the black community has enthusiastically embraced needle exchange.
"I think that we still have a divided house. Some feel it encourages
drugs," says Williams. James Shephard, for instance, a former crack
and PCP user who now runs a drug rehab program in the shadow of
elevated commuter rail tracks in Washington, DC, says, "I am totally
against needle exchange, because it gives them the OK to use. We deal
with total abstinence here. Abstinence is the key." And in a New York
Times Op-Ed piece in April of last year, James Curtis, a Columbia
University and Harlem Hospital psychiatrist, argued that
needle-exchange policies hurt individual addicts and minority
communities. "The indisputable fact is that needle exchanges merely
help addicts continue to use drugs," he wrote. "It's not unlike giving
an alcoholic a clean Scotch tumbler to prevent meningitis."

Rangel once had a similar view, but he now takes a qualified position.
Before, he put clean needles in the same category with clean drugs -
clean or dirty, they were bad. Today he says he hates to see needles
exchanged without drug education. "But the danger of death, to me," he
says, "has been far more serious than the question of having needle
exchange associated with a substantive program." After weighing the
dangers of AIDS versus needle programs, he says "there's now enough
evidence to convince me that needle exchange reduces the loss of life."

Learning from family, friends and neighbors, African-Americans have
rethought their opposition to needle exchange, says Rangel. "You don't
have to be a historian to know that AIDS had been considered for so
long a homosexual problem and not a regular problem," he recalls. "Our
churches in Harlem and Harlems around the country said that AIDS was
the devil's way of punishing evil people." But as people realized how
widely the disease had spread and how infectious needles were
"partially responsible for the many funerals and the many illnesses
that we had in the community...of course there were changes" in attitude.

Those changes are based on bottom-line effectiveness, not ideology or
partisan politics. According to John Wabash, a research associate at
Drug Strategies, studies show that, black or white, "people look for
something that works. They feel besieged.... People want to do what is
going to work now." With mounting evidence that innovative programs
such as needle exchange do work, and a strong belief that the
disparity in cocaine sentencing practices is based on race, many in
the black community are ready to force drug policy issues before
political candidates. In its next rating of members of Congress, for
instance, the NAACP will include how they voted on Rangel-sponsored
legislation that would eliminate the cocaine sentencing disparity.
Simplistic stances against crime and drugs may no longer be enough to
sway voters whose communities have been ravaged by drug pushers and
held back by shortsighted policies.

Joe Davidson formerly covered criminal justice issues for the Wall Street
Journal and is now a media fellow with the Center on Crime, Culture and
Communities.