Editorial: COLLEGES OF CRIME

Tough, no-appeal drug laws turn first-time offenders into career criminals.
It doesn’t have to be that way.

Statistics show that crime is going down, but the numbers hide stories like
Angela Thompson’s. She was 17, with no criminal record and plans for
college, when her drug-dealing uncle convinced her to sell two ounces of
cocaine to an undercover police officer. Under New York’s draconian drug
laws, the judge had no choice but to sentence her to 15 years to life in
state prison. Angela took college courses anyway. When the state cut
funding for them, she was six credits shy of an associate’s degree. And
when the governor commuted her sentence in December, she had spent eight
years behind bars.

Tough, no-appeal drug laws are driving the number of prisoners higher and
higher, even as the crime rate drops. The number of violent and property
crimes per 100,000 Americans has declined from nearly 6,000 in 1991 to just
over 5,000 in 1996, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Meanwhile, the number of persons in custody per 100,000 has risen from 481
in 1991 to 614 in 1996 and 645 as of mid-1997. Several trends might explain
why crime is dropping, including a decade of decline in the number of young
men, who are most likely to commit crimes; more effective police work; and,
of course, tougher laws. But what happens to first-time, non-violent drug
offenders who get long prison sentences? Some pull through, as Angela did.
Others are trained to be professional criminals.

The number of Americans in prison or jail custody has been increasing at
6.5 percent a year since 1990, and more than one-third of this growth is
due to drug offenses. More than 1.7 million Americans are now serving time,
or about as many as the population of New Mexico. Some criminologists worry
that first-time drug offenders who spend years in jail will be likely to
return to crime once they are paroled, using the connections they made
while serving time. If this happens, the prison boom will become a vicious
cycle.

It could be happening already. For most of this decade, growth in state and
federal prisoners has been faster than growth in inmates of local jails.
Between 1996 and 1997, however, the number of jail inmates shot up 9.4
percent, to 567,000, while the number of prisoners increased just 4.7
percent, to 1,159,000. This is ominous because most people in jails are
awaiting trial or serving sentences of less than a year. In this way,
today’s jail numbers are a leading indicator of tomorrow’s prison numbers,
says Franklin Zimring, a criminologist at the University of
California-Berkeley.

In the 1980s, many politicians got elected by promising mandatory jail time
for drug dealers. As a result, thousands of low-level drug runners are now
spending their college years in prison. In New York alone, the cost of
prison for nonviolent drug offenders is about $600 million a year. That
money would be better spent on prevention, treatment, and education.