PEOPLE IMPRISONED FOR DRUG CRIMES DOWN 62 PERCENT SINCE N.Y. RELAXED LAWS

Nearly 40 years after tough new drug laws led to an explosive growth
in prison rolls, New York State has dramatically reversed course,
chalking up a 62 percent drop in people serving time for drug crimes
today compared with 2000, according to a Poughkeepsie Journal analysis.

The steep decline -- driven, experts said, by shifting attitudes
toward drug offenders and lower crime -- means that nearly 17,000
fewer minorities serve state time today than in 2000, groups that
were hardest hit by the so-called war on drugs. Overall, the prison
population declined 22 percent.

While pointing out that Hispanics and blacks are still vastly
overrepresented in prisons, incarceration experts said the overall
figures were impressive.

"The drop itself is really quite extraordinary," said Michael
Jacobson, director of the Manhattan-based Vera Institute of Justice,
a nonprofit center for justice policy research.

"This is very intriguing stuff and encouraging," said Marc Mauer,
executive director of the Sentencing Project, a Washington,
D.C.-based organization that has criticized sentencing policies as
racially biased and counterproductive.

When compared nationwide, New York's figures are especially stunning.
Among the 50 states, New York charted the biggest drop in its prison
rolls from 2000 to 2010, a decade when 37 state prison systems had
double-digit population hikes. Ironically, it was the state's 1973
drug laws, championed by then-Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller, that helped
kick off a massive national prison buildup -- and the highest
incarceration rate in the industrialized world.

Now, with state prison spending at $3.7 billion in fiscal 2010
($55,000 per inmate), New York may be leading the way back.

Fewer minorities

The state's stark prison decline means that thousands of people are
not in prison today who would have been there a decade ago.

Nearly 7,700 fewer blacks are incarcerated in state prison in 2011
compared with 2000, the study found. In addition, 35 percent fewer
female inmates serve time -- and 77 percent fewer women serve drug
sentences as their top crime. Inmates were also older, by three years
on average, according to the analysis, which used databases of the
inmate population on one day each in April 2000 and March 2011.

The trend is an outgrowth, experts said, of an array of factors
including the diversion of more drug offenders to treatment, changes
in drug laws and lower crime rates -- especially in New York City,
which currently ranks among the safest big cities in America. There,
aggressive "stop-and-frisk," zero-tolerance and computer-driven
anti-crime programs have been employed, some say, with remarkable results.

"It's exactly these policies," said the Vera Institute's Jacobson,
"that are driving crime down." And, with it, he and others said, the
flow of inmates to state prisons.

While the New York City policies are highly controversial -- 600,000
people were frisked in 2010, statistics show, 90 percent or them
minority -- there's little doubt of the city's mighty contribution to
the state's prison reversal. The five boroughs charted a 42 percent
decline in sentenced inmates in 2011 compared to 2000; inmates from
the rest of the state actually increased 17 percent. Both the city
and upstate saw big declines in drug commitments, but the city's
decline, 76 percent, was three times that of upstate.

Similarly, the rolls of city jails dropped 16 percent since 2000,
while county lockups statewide saw a 15 percent hike, statistics show.

The decline in drug-convicted inmates means more of the type of
inmate for which penitentiaries were constructed: violent offenders.

Today, the No. 1 top crime of sentenced inmates is second-degree
murder, with just over 8,000 convicts -- about the same as in 2000.

In 2000, the most common top crime for which inmates were
incarcerated was third-degree criminal sale of a controlled
substance, with almost 10,000 people sentenced. That's now down to about 3,000.

"I would argue that the right people are being sentenced to prison,"
said Brian Fischer, New York state's prison commissioner. "Was prison
the best alternative for drug abusers? Clearly it was not."

While Fischer also favors diverting nonviolent mentally ill offenders
to achieve further downsizing -- "that's the goal," he said -- he
doesn't plan to close any more than the nine prisons shuttered since
2009. In fact, while the system lost 15,000 inmates since 2000, it
has closed just 6,277 beds, a hard-fought battle in a state in which
prisons sustain many job-poor upstate communities.

Prison boom

Before adoption of its drug laws in 1973, New York had built just 18
prisons in 140 years. Driven by mandatory drug sentences and other
tough-on-crime statutes, the state opened 52 prisons from 1973 to
2000, raising the population from 13,400 to a historic peak, on Dec.
12, 1999, of 71,538 inmates. It was 55,599 last week.

With the population shrinking, the state closed three of its then 69
prisons in 2009 and six more as of Oct. 1, with Arthur Kill prison on
Staten Island set to close by Dec. 1. Portions of eight other prisons
have also been closed since 2009.

The downsizing is embraced by Fischer, reform advocates and, even,
the District Attorneys Association of the State of New York, which
had long resisted drug-law changes that would cede some prosecutorial
power to judges.

"It wasn't in anyone's interest to wholesale incarcerate anyone who
committed a drug crime," said the group's president, Janet DiFiore, a
former judge and current Westchester County district attorney. "For
those hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people who were just
unfortunately drug-addled people, that wasn't the right view."

DiFiore ties the prison downturn both to drug law reforms -- in 2004,
2005 and 2009 -- and a recognition in law enforcement that
alternatives like drug treatment were needed. Almost 200 drug courts
have been opened statewide, most since 2000, that divert many
otherwise prison-bound offenders to treatment.

The downsizing doesn't impress some reform advocates, who still see
the system as hugely bloated, especially with blacks and Hispanics,
now 77 percent of inmates and down from 84 percent in 2000.

"The disparities have diminished somewhat and that's good news, but
that does not put us as a state in a place that we can be proud of,"
said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil
Liberties Union, which has opposed city frisking policies as invasive
and discriminatory. "We were starting at a pretty horrific place from
which to decline."

"The prosecution of drug offenses is still tremendously racially
biased," said Jack Beck, a project director for the Correctional
Association of New York, which monitors state prisons. Although more
whites serve time, he said the proportion "is still grossly out of
line with drug use in society."

What's clear is that the downturn is continuing, equal to one or two
large prisons in each of the last three years. And it may even
accelerate with most experts agreeing that the latest drug law
reforms have yet to fully kick in.

In 2009, amendments to the Drug Law Reform Act gave judges far
broader discretion to divert offenders to drug treatment or sentence
them to lesser, non-mandatory, terms. In 2004 and 2005, the act
reduced the harshest sentences -- 15 years to life for selling as
little as two ounces of cocaine or possessing four ounces -- but
those reforms only marginally reduced the population, experts said.

'Mindset change'

Moreover, the reforms are an outgrowth of something much larger than
a drug-war backlash, according to close prison observers, among these
ballooning prison budgets, the economic downturn and a realization
that punishment isn't always the answer.

"Prosecutors were recognizing that our job was not just about
handcuffs and prison," said DiFiore, the DAs' president. "It was a
mindset change."

"In a time of economic recession it causes a rethinking," said Alan
Rosenthal, director of justice strategies for the Center for
Community Alternatives, a Manhattan-based sentencing reform group.
"We had a shift from tough on crime to smart on crime," an
acknowledgement, he added, that high prison rolls did not equate with
lower crime.

Indeed, whether high prison rolls reduce crime is an open question.
Rates of major crime in New York state have dropped 63 percent since
1990 -- a consistent decline even as the prison population rose an
average 4 percent a year in the 1990s and declined an average 2
percent a year in the 2000s.

The latest prison closures will save taxpayers $72 million in fiscal
2011, according to state officials -- about 2 percent of the prison
budget, which grew 30 percent since 2000. Fischer, the prison
commissioner, attributed the growth to new mental health and
disciplinary programs required under law and in settlement of a
lawsuit against the system, expanded sex offender treatment and
increasing personnel costs.

When he announced the latest closure plans last June, Gov. Andrew
Cuomo called the system "too inefficient and too costly with far more
capacity than what is needed." But he also recognized that prisons
were "a major source of employment and economic sustainability," and
set up $50 million economic development fund to help affected communities.

Two-thirds of the state's prisons saw double-digit percentage
declines in population since 2000, the Journal analysis found, and
Fischer, the prison commissioner, would like to see other inmates diverted.

"If alternatives work rather well for nonviolent drug offenders," he
said, "we should talk about alternatives that we don't have now for
people with mental illness or medical problems," especially as the
population ages.

Said Gabriel Sayegh, New York director of the Drug Policy Alliance, a
national reform advocacy group, "These trends are good indications
that we're headed in the right direction."