THE MANDATORY-SENTENCING MISTAKE

Vincent Schiraldi's call sounded for all the world like another of those
false syllogisms that make me crazy. You know: For the money it costs to
keep a young man in prison, we could send him to Harvard. Or, if we took
the money we're spending on the drug "wars" and spent it on the public
schools, every kid in America would have a shot at a first-rate education.

Such non sequiturs, I told him, fail to convince anyone not already on your
side of the argument. Worse, by giving your opponents such a vulnerable
target, you encourage the impression that your argument -- not just your
jerry-built straw man -- has been demolished.

What Schiraldi, director of the Washington-based Justice Policy Institute,
had discovered is that over the past 10 years, New York State has increased
spending on prisons by very close to the amount by which it has decreased
spending on higher education.

So is he saying that if the state spent less on prisons, it would spend
more on colleges -- and vice versa? And if he's not saying that, what is he
saying?

"Look," he told me, "I'm the last person who wants to set up 'straw men' in
advocating criminal justice reform. The other side has an easy enough time
knocking us down as it is. But I think this higher-ed vs. prisons analysis
does provide the needed scale by which to illustrate the growth of the
prison system and how prisons have come to dominate our political and
social landscape.

"New York State is spending nearly twice as much on prisons as it did a
decade ago -- a $761 million increase -- while spending on the city and
state university systems has declined by $615 million during the same period."

Then Schiraldi -- perhaps sensing that my eyes were starting to glaze over
- -- interrupted his account to tell me about Tom Eddy.

"Tom and I were both at SUNY [State University of New York] Binghamton
when, in 1979, he was arrested under the Rockefeller drug laws. He wound up
serving 13 years of a 15-to-life sentence for selling two ounces of cocaine.

"Though Tom and I began in the same place, I started a nonprofit, started a
family and launched a life while he wasted over a decade in prison. His
story, to me, embodies the wastefulness of these laws, and how our prisons
are warehousing people who don't need to be there."

And suddenly Schiraldi was making sense to me in a way the mirror-image
symmetry of his prison/college dichotomy did not. The spending patterns are
not the problem; the problem is poorly thought-out policy, misguided
toughness and bad law.

The Rockefeller laws -- touted as a no-nonsense approach to ridding New
York of the scourge of drugs -- provided mandatory jail times for drug
offenses that were often in excess of sentences for violent crimes. Once
people understood that not even judges could soften their sentences, people
would think twice about dealing drugs.

The target, of course, was big-time drug racketeers. One of the first to be
snared was Eddy, a national merit scholar in his sophomore year.

It's fair to say that Eddy, whose sentence was commuted by then-Gov. Mario
Cuomo four years ago this month, caused his own problems. But it is also
fair to wonder if the state got good value for the money it spent keeping
him locked up for more than 13 years.

And it is crucial to ask whether it isn't time to end this mistaken policy
- -- and not just in New York.

Much of the prison overcrowding (and the consequent need for huge new
outlays for new and expanded prison facilities) is the result of mandatory
sentencing for drug offenders, including -- perhaps even mainly --
low-level dealers.

When Eddy first ran afoul of the draconian Rockefeller laws, 11 percent of
the inmates of New York prisons were there for drug offenses. By last year,
47 percent were in prison for drug offenses. The trend is national and --
Schiraldi's point -- it is the source of our prison-building boom that is
distorting state budgets across America.

He's right, of course -- right also when he notes that Florida and
California now have bigger budgets for prisons than for higher education.

But you don't need any false syllogisms to make that point -- no nonsense
about how New York could have sent several men like Eddy through college
for what it cost to keep him in the slammer. I'm content to let Eddy send
himself to college (he's about to get his law degree). I just wish we could
admit our mandatory-sentencing mistake and stop throwing good money after
bad.

Checked-by: Richard Lake