Drug Wars
WALTERS, JOHN P.
Drug Wars Just say no . . . to treatment without law enforcement. BY JOHN F; WALTERS THE WAR ON CRIME AND DRUGS IS rapidly losing ground to the war on punishment and prisons. Recently, N^-ws-week...
...Sentencing Commission reports that 94.2 percent of the 20,893 federal drug offenders had pleaded guilty, usually to a lesser charge...
...He notes that "the declining crime rate of the last eight years would have to continue unbroken for another three decades before we returned to the crime levels the Baby Boomers enjoyed as children...
...The evidence is that coerced treatment works at least as well as voluntary treatment, and it has long been a staple of effective treatment programs that the addict must take responsibility for himself...
...And even these numbers overstate the incarceration rate for drug possession...
...Crime, after all, is not evenly distributed throughout society...
...In the Winter 2001 issue of the Public Interest,, Paul H. Robinson argues that we have...
...The same data also indicate that 91.1 percent of state prisoners were violent or repeat offenders or both...
...The most recent data, moreover, reveal how limited has been the "success" of incapacitation: In 1997, 46.6 percent of state prisoners had been on probation or parole when they were arrested for the offense for which they were serving time...
...Neither is it true that the prison population is disproportionately made up of young black men...
...The situation at the federal level is even more lopsided...
...property offenses 22 percent...
...With the sharp drop in crime, have we made criminal punishment too harsh...
...Moreover, federal law contains a "bypass" provision to allow low-level, nonviolent offenders to avoid mandatory minimum sentences...
...on the cover, along with a series of articles and essays on the drug problem with the general theme that law enforcement and incarceration don't work and that we need to embrace treatment and new treatment drugs...
...In fiscal year 1999, just 2.2 percent of federal drug convictions were for simple possession...
...black males between 18 and 24 were over 8 times more likely to be victims...
...According to the most current data, in 1997 only 8.8 percent of the 1,046,705 individuals in state prisons were there for drug possession...
...If it weren't for the ideology associated with treatment—addiction is a disease, not a pattern of behavior for which people can be held responsible—law enforcement and punishment would be natural partners of the treatment providers (remember Marion Barry, whose treatment followed his arrest...
...thing, the trend of anti-drinking and anti-smoking efforts today is to criminalize certain aspects of use and to attack availability...
...Whether one looks at murder, violent crime in general, or drug trafficking, criminals overwhelmingly victimize people like themselves...
...Drug trafficking offenses accounted for 11.3 percent of those imprisoned...
...But are prison sentences too long...
...It should be obvious, then, who will be harmed most if fewer violent and repeat offenders and drug traffickers are punished and sentences are substantially reduced...
...and violent crimes 47.2 percent...
...Newsweek makes much of the promise of new wonder drugs for treatment, but what new anti-drug drug is likely to work substantially better than the drugs we have to block tobacco craving ("the patch" and "the gum") and the medication we have to make alcohol consumption a sickening experience for alcoholics...
...In 1998, black males between the ages of 14 and 17 were almost 6 times more likely than white males to be victims of murder or non-negligent manslaughter...
...Recently, N^-ws-week featured Robert Downey Jr...
...What really drives the battle against law enforcement and punishment, however, is not a commitment to treatment, but the widely held view that (1) we are imprisoning too many people for merely possessing illegal drugs, (2) drug and other criminal sentences are too long and harsh, and (3) the criminal justice system is unjustly punishing young black men...
...Although we do not know for sure how many of those sentenced for a drug possession conviction were actually traffickers who were allowed to plead guilty to a lesser charge, or repeat offenders whose record put them in prison for their most recent offense, or both, the available data suggest the numbers are very large indeed...
...But Downey only seems to get treated for his addiction when he is forced to by the criminal justice system...
...Now is our chance to make prevention and enforcement work...
...In fiscal year 1999, the U.S...
...In 1998, of the 7,276 murders in the United States that involved a single offender and a single victim, 5,133 of the victims were male and 3,309 were black...
...and for those 25 and over, black males were murder victims at a rate 7.6 times that of white males...
...But Robinson makes too little of the fact that incapacitation—^pro-tecting the public from criminals, particularly repeat offenders—has almost always been one of the goals of punishment in our criminal justice system...
...Even Robinson acknowledges, however, that there is considerably less to the drop in crime than conventional wisdom would suggest...
...These are among the great urban myths of our time...
...They punish offenders not just for what they have done, but also for what they are viewed as likely to do in the future...
...Nonetheless, Robinson argues that longer sentences and "three strikes" laws are unjust because they pursue a policy of incapacitating criminals under the "cloak" of punishment...
...These are useful tools, but there are still many smokers and alcoholics...
...If anyJohn P. Walters, president of the Philanthropy Roundtable, was deputy director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy during the previous Bush administration...
...The therapy-only lobby is alive and well and more dogmatic than ever...
...Indeed, it's hard to imagine a worse advertisement for the effectiveness of drug treatment than Robert Downey Jr...
...According to the FBI, 3,565 of the offenders in these murder cases were black, and 3,067 of the murders involved both a black victim and a black offender...
...Instead of retreating from punishment, we should be contemplating the limited demographic window before us: By 2010, the population between the ages of 15 and 17, just entering the most crime-prone years, will be 31 percent larger than it was in 1990...
...It is common knowledge that the suburbs are safer than the inner city, though we are not supposed to mention it...
...The idea that our prisons are filled with people whose only offense was possession of an illegal drug is utter fantasy...
...Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, violent crimes vastly outpaced drug offenses as the cause of the prison population's rapid growth...
...Though some who call for such reforms have the best of intentions, they recommend a course not of compassion but of cruelty...
...And consider this: Americans are still more likely to experience what statisticians call "violent victimization" than to be injured in a car crash...
Vol. 6 • March 2001 • No. 24
