THE CASUALTIES OF WAR

Using Prisons To Solve The Drug Problem Hurts Not Just The Black And
Latino Communities That Have Suffered The Most, But All Of America

In search of stories, we sniff the sewer of scandal; and aroused by
the scent, we fearless journalists strike. So tell us, George W., did
you snort it? Did you smoke it? And assuming that you did, tell us
when. Somehow we make of this a test of character. And in some minor
sense it is. But in the end it doesn't tell us much about whether a
man deserves to be president. Irrespective of what George W. Bush
might have done in his wilder, daring days, he and other presidential
candidates have a responsibility to reflect on this so-called war on
drugs. Largely because of that so-called war, more Americans than ever
are behind bars. The federal prison population quintupled in less than
two decades, as the number of people sentenced for federal drug
offenses multiplied more than 11 times. A huge proportion of those
convicted have come from places such as Watts in Los Angeles that are
predominantly black and Latino. Part of the reason is that drug
dealing in poor inner-city communities is more likely to be out in the
open than it is in the suburbs, where it generally takes place behind
closed doors. Another reason is that residents of such neighborhoods
are less likely to have sophisticated legal help -- or to get the
benefit of the doubt from prosecutors. They are also more likely to be
caught with crack cocaine, an offense that carries much stiffer
penalties than possessing the powdered kind.

Connie Rice, cofounder of a Los Angeles-based advocacy group called
The Advancement Project, estimates the number of prisoners and
ex-prisoners among men from certain parts of Watts at nearly 50
percent. "I don't understand the lack of alarm about it," she says.
Dina Rose, a sociologist at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in
New York, notes that in such communities prison time is so prevalent
it has become a natural and expected part of life. And she questions
whether arresting such large numbers of people really drives down
crime. Rose's preliminary research in Tallahassee, Fla., has found
that arrest levels soon reach a "tipping point" beyond which a
community becomes so destabilized that the crime rate goes up instead
of down as more people are imprisoned.

It would be one thing if we could be confident that this focus on
imprisonment was solving the drug problem. But the evidence is, at
best, mixed. Overall drug use is down from its peak in 1979 (cocaine
use peaked six years later, in 1985). But there is little evidence
that incarceration policies had much to do with it. In the get-tough
state of Texas, for example, cocaine use is rising. Among students, it
is at its highest level since the annual survey of the Texas
Commission on Alcohol and Drug Abuse began in 1988. Meanwhile, heroin
overdoses in Texas have risen, as has the percentage of adolescents
testing positive for marijuana upon arrest -- and all this despite the
fact that Texas has the second highest incarceration rate (724 per
100,000 residents) of any state in the nation (just after Louisiana).

Texas's prison-focused policy has been a failure. And so, in large
measure, has the nation's "war." It has left us with overcrowded
prisons, and with hundreds of thousands of people who have lost the
right to vote, and have little chance at a job and a slim prayer of
being reconnected to the larger society. It has also left many
Americans, particularly black Americans, with the sense the judicial
system is "the new Jim Crow," in the words of Eric Sterling, president
of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation. For all that, taxpayers
foot a huge bill for prisons as the convict population swells.

Obviously, some people are so violent and incorrigible that prison is
the only fit place for them. The problem is that we are spending less
and less time figuring out who those people are; and we are devoting
precious little energy to reclaiming those lives that can be
reclaimed. We have also given up on the very idea of rehabilitation,
of providing prisoners with skills and hope. Instead, we warehouse the
fallen in dismal places that produce nothing more useful, for the most
part, than license plates and ruined souls. One reason is that the war
rhetoric and the war mentality allow us to create "collateral
casualties," in the words of William Mofitt, president of the National
Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. The tragedy is that many of
those collateral casualties are potentially productive human beings.

America needs desperately to break its addiction to this witch's brew
of angry language, absurd (often dishonest) assumptions and
ineffective policy that is poisoning the nation from within. Since
presidential-campaign rhetoric -- going back at least to Richard
Nixon's celebrated war on crime -- is a large part of what got us into
this fix, it's only fair to expect that anyone seriously aspiring to
the presidency be committed to getting us out.

Ultimately, however, the problem is not just one for politicians --
whether they are suspected of using drugs or not -- but for those who
elect them; for all, in other words, who have responded too readily to
the whoops of bloodthirsty generals waging war with a strategy that
will never win.