AS I SEE IT

by Cynthia Tucker

DOUBLE STANDARD ON DRUG SENTENCES

THERE ARE forgotten neighborhoods in America where the holiday season
imposes a distinct and peculiar ritual: Mom and the kids, or Grandma and
the grand kids, pack up a few goodies in tin plates and paper bags,
carefully wrapped in foil. They set out early for a visit preordained to be
brief and circumscribed, its joy Iimited by the setting. They go to visit
relative in prison.

The places in America already decimated by poverty and economic collapse -
the black and brown inner-cities - are also places where many of the young
men are out of circulation. They cannot become taxpayers or decent parents
or reasonable prospects for marriage. They will leave prison with criminal
records that guarantee them limit job opportunities.

Lacking decent incomes, they will never marry the mothers of their
children. And that, in turn, will guarantee another generation of children
who have had little contact with their fathers.

America has succeeded in locking up more of its citizens than any other
country on the planet. The state of California alone has more inmates than
France Britain, Germany, Japan, Singapore and the Netherlands combined,
according to a report of Eric Schlosser in the December issue of the
Atlantic Monthly.

We have incarcerated violent, dangerous felons as well as nonviolent drug
abusers. We have created laws designed to keep the streets safe. And we
have designed laws whose only result is to ensure that entire neighborhoods
regularly send their young men off to prison.

And we have confused the one with the other.

Let's make some distinctions. Many convicted felons are thugs and punks.
Some of them practiced their violent tendencies on their families and
friends first beating a girlfriend, robbing a neighbor, abusing a child.
They deserve to be in prison.

But a substantial portion of the 850,000 black Americans behind bars are
there for non-violent drug offenses. Marc Mauer of the Washington,
DC.-based Sentencing Project estimates the number at 216,000 - about one
fourth. With drug treatment of the sort routinely available to
drug-addicted actors and athletes, or to white-collar employees with good
health, insurance, many of them would become taxpaying citizens, able to
support a family, own a home.

To avoid being labeled "soft" on crime, even politicians who know better
have refused to acknowledge a simple truth: We waste money, as well as
lives, when we lock up non-violent offenders.

"Among those arrested or violent crimes, the proportion are
African-American men has changed little over the past 20 years. Among those
arrested for drug crimes, the proportion who are African-American men has
tripled. Although the prevalence of illegal drug use among white men is
approximately the same as that among black men, black men are five times as
likely to be arrested for a drug offense," Schlosser wrote.

We ought to be able to talk about alternative sentences for non-violent
drug abusers - free drug treatment, with participation a condition of
probation, for example.

The streets may be safer because we have succeeded in locking away for good
many of the most dangerous predators, the gangbangers and serial killers,
the robbers and rapists and carjackers. But the country is no better off
for a shameless double standard that celebrates the privileged athlete,
actor or businessman who licks his drug habit in a ritzy sanitarium, while
imprisoning the crackhead too broke to afford drug treatment.

That policy guarantees a permanent underclass.

Checked-by: Richard Lake