CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM JUST PLAIN BIZZARE

IT's an odd country, really. Our largest growth industries are
gambling and prisons. But as you may have heard, crimes rates are
dropping. We're not putting people into prison for hurting other
people. We're putting them into prison for using drugs, and as we
already know, that doesn't help them or us.

Last year, more than 600,000 people in this country were arrested for
possession of marijuana, a drug less harmful for adults than alcohol.
And according to an ad campaign by Common Sense for Drug Policy, a
Department of Health and Human Services study shows that less than I
percent of marijuana users become regular users of cocaine or heroin.
But the history of our drug policy is that there's always some new
drug to be frightened of, usually associated with a feared minority
group, as opium was with Asians and marijuana with Mexicans. And in
the 1980s, along came crack, associated with inner-city blacks.

According to a series in the. New York Times, "Crack poisoned many
communities. Dealers turned neighborhoods into drug markets. As
heavily armed gangs fought over turf, murder rates shot up.
Authorities warned that crack was instantly addictive and spreading
rapidly and predicted that a generation of crack babies would bear the
drug's imprint. It looked like a nightmare with no end.

"But for all the havoc wreaked by crack, the worst fears were not
realized. Crack appealed mainly to hard-core drug users. The number of
crack users began falling not long after surveys began counting them.
A decade later, the violence of the crack trade has burned out, and
the murder rates have plunged."

Which would be great news, except for Boots Cooper's immortal dictum:
"Some things that won't hurt you will scare you so bad that you hurt
yourself." And you should see what fear of crack has done to the
American system of criminal justice.

The Times reports that every 20 seconds, someone in America is
arrested for a drug violation. Every week, a new jail or prison is
built to house them all in what is now the world's largest penal system.

A lethal combination of media sensationalism and political
lawand-order opportunism pushed through a virulent stew of
get-tough-on-drugs laws. The worst were mandatory minimum sentences
and the three-strikes-and-you're-out laws.

A further distortion in the system produced by these wacky laws is
that good behavior can no longer get you out of prison early; the only
way out is to roll over on somebody else.

And so another unhappy consequence of our fear of crack is that more
and more people are being convicted of crimes they never committed
because other people in prison are willing to lie about them.

"Since 1985, the nation's jail and prison population has grown 130
percent, and it will soon pass 2 million, even as crime rates continue
a six-year decline," reports the Times. And on top of that is the
particularly ugly racist distortion in the law.

The gross disparities in sentencing between powder cocaine users
(largely white) and crack users constitute one of the open scandals of
America. What is less well known is that most crack users are white,
too. But law enforcement has so heavily targeted inner-city blacks
that black users are jailed at a far higher rate.

But none of this has reduced illicit drug use. Far fewer Americans use
drugs today than did at the peak years in the 1970s, but almost all of
the drop occurred before crack or the laws passed in response to it,
according to the Times.

Unless you are a drug user or know somebody in the joint, all this may
seem far removed from your life, It's not. They're taking money away
from your kids' schools to pay for all this, from helping people who
are mentally retarded and mentally ill, from mass transit and public
housing and more parkland and ...