Sentencing changes for crack cocaine

U.S. Sentencing Commission votes for changes to crack cocaine
sentencing guidelines!


WASHINGTON, D.C.: For the first time in 12 years, the U.S. Sentencing
Commission has approved guideline changes to federal crack cocaine
penalties tonight, by a 6-1 vote. The amendment affects approximately
78 percent of defendants convicted of crack cocaine offenses, reducing
their sentences by an average of 16 months. It will now be sent to
Congress on May 1, 2007, along with other proposed sentencing
amendments.


"While this incremental change is a far cry from the
'equalization' of crack and powder cocaine the Commission recommended
in 1995, it is a long overdue first step to improving crack
sentences," said Julie Stewart, president of Families Against
Mandatory Minimums (FAMM), a national, nonpartisan sentencing reform
organization.


For 15 years the Commission has researched crack cocaine and its
penalties and concluded current federal crack sentences are
unjustifiable. Among the findings from its 2002 report are that crack
penalties


1. exaggerate the relative harmfulness of crack cocaine
2. sweep too broadly and apply most often to lower level offenders
3. overstate the seriousness of most crack cocaine offenses and fail
to provide adequate proportionality
4. and mostly impact minorities


Despite this evidence, Congress and the U.S. Sentencing Commission have
been in a stalemate for a dozen years over how to improve crack
sentences. During that time, nearly 56,000 people were sentenced under
the harsh federal crack cocaine statutes and guidelines. Now, the
U.S. Sentencing Commission has taken the bold step of saying enough is
enough.


"While the Commission's amendment does not solve the problem of
excessive crack cocaine penalties it moves us closer to that goal,
which is why FAMM supports the Commission's crack amendment," says
Stewart.


Congress has six months to consider the amendments before they
automatically take effect on November 1, 2007. Congress would have to
pass bills in both the House and Senate to stop the amendment. It is
highly unlikely such an action will happen this year. If passed, the
amendment will not affect people sentenced before November 1, 2007.


The U.S. Sentencing Commission's crack guideline amendment will
be accompanied by language to Congress that urges them to address the
crack cocaine mandatory minimum. Combined changes to the sentencing
guidelines and mandatory minimum statutes for crack cocaine would
result in more appropriate penalties for roughly 5,000 defendants who
face crack sentences each year. With their faces in mind, FAMM
applauds the Commission for acting on an injustice that can no longer
be tolerated.


Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM) is a national, nonpartisan,
nonprofit organization that promotes just sentencing policies. For more
information, visit: www.famm.org.

What's wrong with the drug war?

What's Wrong With the Drug War?

taken from web site
www.drugpolicy.org

Everyone has a stake in ending the war on drugs. Whether you’re a parent concerned about protecting children from drug-related harm, a social justice advocate worried about racially disproportionate incarceration rates, an environmentalist seeking to protect the Amazon rainforest or a fiscally conservative taxpayer you have a stake in ending the drug war. U.S. federal, state and local governments have spent hundreds of billions of dollars trying to make America “drug-free.” Yet heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine and other illicit drugs are cheaper, purer and easier to get than ever before. Nearly half a million people are behind bars on drug charges - more than all of western Europe (with a bigger population) incarcerates for all offenses. The war on drugs has become a war on families, a war on public health and a war on our constitutional rights.

Many of the problems the drug war purports to resolve are in fact caused by the drug war itself. So-called “drug-related” crime is a direct result of drug prohibition's distortion of immutable laws of supply and demand. Public health problems like HIV and Hepatitis C are all exacerbated by zero tolerance laws that restrict access to clean needles. The drug war is not the promoter of family values that some would have us believe. Children of inmates are at risk of educational failure, joblessness, addiction and delinquency. Drug abuse is bad, but the drug war is worse.

Visit these pages to see how the drug war affects all aspects of our lives:

Drug War Funding
Pain Underprescribing
Terrorism
Informants
Environmental Consequences
Economics
Mandatory Minimum Sentences
Voter Disenfranchisement
Public Health Crisis
Access to Treatment
Higher Education Act
Public Benefits
Forced Evictions

Louisvillle Church group CLOUT says Stop the Revolving Door.

Group wants to rehabilitate criminals, stop 'revolving door'

March 20, 2007 01:51 PM

By Mark Schnyder

Courier Journal

(LOUISVILLE) -- A lot of criminals end up breaking the law repeatedly, going in and out of jail their entire lives. Now an organization made up of area church congregations is calling on Kentucky to stop the revolving door at state prisons. WAVE 3 Investigator Mark Schnyder has more.

It was a Monday night sermon where the participants hope passion can solve a problem.

"Me and my colleagues in the ministry are tired of burying young people, victims of drug murders -- we're going to do something about it," said the Rev. Elvyn Hamilton to a crowd of about 700 CLOUT (Citizens of Louisville Organized and United Together) members at the 4th Avenue United Methodist Church Monday night.

In response, the crowd chanted: "Stop the revolving door! Stop the revolving door!"

Hundreds of people from more than a dozen metro area churches chanted CLOUT's mantra. Meanwhile, Louisville residents, organized and united together, put some of the state justice system's heaviest hitters on the spot.

"Do you agree we have a problem with the revolving door?" Bishop Walter Jones asked Kentucky Department of Corrections Commissioner John Rees.

His response: "yes."

Bishop Walter Jones called on Rees and State Supreme Court Chief Justice Joseph Lambert to commit to doing more to treat people going through the system with drug problems so they don't keep coming back. But amid the calls for more programs, treatment centers and drug courts, a revelation: it's already happening.

In the last nine years in Kentucky the number of drug courts -- which put offenders on a road to recovery -- have grown from 12 to 60.

"Drug courts have grown dramatically," Justice Lambert said. "Now every person who enters drug court does not leave successfully, there are failures. But the failures are vastly outweighed by the successes."

Justice Lambert and Commissioner Rees did not agree to every request CLOUT called for. Rees would not commit to creating a new training program for drug and alcohol addiction for the probation and paroles office, and Justice Lambert couldn't promise a licensed treatment component in Jefferson County's drug court program.

But CLOUT leaders say they got some things done.

The director of Metro Corrections was also invited to take the heat, but he did not attend. CLOUT wants him to develop a new drug treatment program for jail inmates.

Online Reporter: Mark Schnyder

Online Producer:

Stop the prison revolving door. . .

Stop the Revolving Door By Mark A.R. Kleiman DLC | Blueprint Magazine | September 25, 2002 Paschal: Our first organizing meeting of a coalition of persons and organizations called Kentuckians Expective Effective Criminal Justice, held this morning, April 18, with 20 persons present, concluded that the focus should be Stopping the Relvoving Door. I will be posting articles and discussions under this focus for our work so that we all might be better informed and aware. Notice some of the facts offered in the first paragraph below. No matter how much we pat ourselves on the back about the recent declines in U.S. crime rates, the fact remains that crime is about three times as prevalent in America today as it was as recently as 1960. Even now, our homicide rate remains at about five times the level of that in the rest of the developed world. The consequences of high crime rates go far beyond the numbers. Much of America's social geography is dictated by the desire to avoid victimization. What else could explain the coexistence of high housing prices and residential abandonment in the same metropolitan areas? Everyone knows that poverty leads to crime; less attention is paid to the ways that crime leads to poverty by driving jobs and services away from the places poor people live. Given how much nonsense office-seekers are forced to talk when they discuss crime, its declining salience as a political issue is a welcome development. But controlling crime remains a central challenge for American society; we continue to face the threat that an upsurge in crime (such as the one the United States suffered in the 1960s or the one Western Europe has been suffering recently) will give anti-progressive political forces another great political opportunity. So what is to be done? Arguments about crime control tend to focus on how to change the behavior of criminals. In some ways, that's the easy part; criminals respond when their behavior has immediate and predictable consequences. The hard part is changing the behavior of officials to make those things happen. Reducing the crime rate is more a public management problem than a criminology problem. And one key to management success, as we're learning from other areas of public policy, is performance accountability. Nowhere has the accountability principle been more decisively demonstrated than in New York City's declining crime rates. The crime drop had many causes, both inside and outside the police department. But the one that stands out was the bold announcement by Police Commissioner Bill Bratton that he was willing to be held quantitatively accountable for crime reduction. Putting his own reputation on the line -- and betting it on measurable results rather than on a laundry list of specific policies or organizational changes -- enabled Bratton to hold his subordinates similarly accountable. Faced with the pressure to perform and to perform in the foreseeable future rather than in the sweet by-and-by, the New York Police Department found itself capable of astonishing accomplishments. The rate of murders went down by three-quarters and is staying down; property crime rates kept pace. For some reason, no one seems to have thought of extending this accountability revolution to corrections agencies. Yet holding corrections officials accountable for recidivism among their probationers, parolees, and prison alumni is more obviously justified than holding the police responsible for the overall crime rate. Many things influence the crime rate in a city beyond the effectiveness of its police department. But if arrests for serious new crimes are much less frequent among probationers in one probation office than among similar probationers in another office, or if the graduates of one medium-security prison are much more likely to be back inside within six months than the graduates of another, then the worse-performing institution might have something to learn from the better-performing institution. Since most crime, especially serious violent crime, is committed by repeat offenders, focusing on the offenders whose names we know needs to be central to any serious crime control strategy. Current performance wouldn't be hard to improve on. In most states, an offender leaving prison has a worse-than-even chance of staying out for three years, and there's no evidence that routine probation supervision has any crime-control benefit whatsoever. Some specific programs are known to work. Frequent drug tests for probationers and parolees, with immediate and predictable, but not severe, sanctions for every incident of drug use, can reduce hard-drug consumption, a strong predictor of recidivism. In-prison literacy programs can improve employability, and getting a job is a strong correlate of going straight. Part of the reason such commonsense approaches aren't widely adopted is that the whole project of turning offenders' lives around -- inducing them to live as citizens rather than predators -- was tainted by its association with a kindhearted but muddle-headed version of penology. When crime was low, some influential prison officials and academics tried to reinvent prisons and probation and parole agencies as primarily service institutions. The announced goal -- rehabilitation -- became entangled with what turned out to be a fundamentally wrong idea of how to achieve it, which might be summed up as "be nice to criminals and criminals will be nice to you." Over the past 35 years, a political sea change, driven by rising crime, made a hard line toward offenders the only publicly acceptable attitude. Naturally, but unfortunately, this led to the virtual abandonment of the idea that rehabilitation ought to be a central focus of prison administration. Somehow, giving up the idea of being nice to criminals came to imply giving up any intention of making them other than criminal. To talk of rehabilitation now marks a politician or corrections official as an unrealistic, soft-on-crime bleeding heart. The adversarial nature of the courtroom process fosters the illusion that criminal justice is a zero-sum game. In fact, since both crime and punishment are expensive, offenders and the rest of us have a mutual interest in offenders' turning from crime to honest work. In particular, those who portray themselves politically as advocates for the victims of crime ought to be more concerned than they seem to be with the fact that unrehabilitated criminals are future threats. Yet in the current political climate, rehabilitation, in the hardheaded sense of reducing future criminality, plays virtually no role in the design, execution, or evaluation of corrections programs. At the same time, imprisonment has exploded. We now have about 2 million people behind bars, about four times the incarceration rate of a generation ago, a level unprecedented in American history and unmatched in the developed world. Poor urban communities are being hit with a flood of prison returnees, and that flood is beginning to show up in rising crime rates, but no one is turning to the wardens and demanding that they become part of the solution. Perhaps surprisingly, the private prison industry has utterly failed to demonstrate either cost savings or reduced recidivism rates, other than by selecting the least-cost, least-likely-to-repeat offenders. Recidivism ought to be an easy case for incentive contracting, but that isn't the way private-prison contracts are drawn. And for some reason nonprofit groups have almost no participation in adult institutional corrections, though they play very important roles in dealing with juvenile offenders and in providing some post-release programming. A little not-for-profit competition based on recidivism rates might help jump-start the interest of the public systems in installing one-way exits instead of revolving doors. Of course, any contracting-out approach confronts its own challenges: building accountability into the contracts and (even harder) getting that accountability enforced in the face of the political muscle that contractors, whether for-profit or not-for-profit, virtually always wield. But whatever we do about prison privatization, the first step in reforming corrections is measuring the crime control performance of the existing corrections agencies. The case for accountability doesn't rest on any specific theory of what would bring about rehabilitation. It rests on two basic propositions: that recidivism isn't completely insensitive to the way our corrections agencies conduct themselves, and that the people who work in those agencies and run them have the skill and ingenuity to make better things happen, given the appropriate authority and the appropriate incentives. Being accountable for next month's numbers concentrates the organizational mind wonderfully; it can, at best, create a sort of every-cat-is-good-as-long-as-it-catches-mice pragmatism. Real accountability can make even ideas "not invented here" seem worth trying once. Formally, the problem is similar to the problem of bringing accountability to public education. Consider the parallels: Both the tasks are important and both are done unevenly and less than optimally. In each case, it's not hard to figure out some key things we ought to be measuring: reading ability in the schools and crimes committed by offenders in the corrections case. In neither case are those easy-to-measure things the only aspects of performance worth worrying about (we should consider curiosity among students, for example, or prisoner-on-prisoner assault, or the employment rate among probationers), and therefore both systems require multiple measures of process and outcome to avoid creating perverse incentives for managers (for example, to drop art and music classes from schools or to ignore infectious disease and other health issues in correctional settings). Since both students and offenders differ enormously among themselves and across institutions, any reasonable accountability system in either domain needs to adjust for the client mix or we just wind up punishing the institutions that get stuck with the hard cases. Random variation makes it both essential and hard to develop clever statistical measures to make sure we're not rewarding and punishing "noise" in the test scores or the crime rates. There's a tension between the need for adequate sample sizes to deal with the "noise" problem and the desirability of moving accountability down to the lowest practicable level of the organization. The more we can hold individual teachers or probation officers accountable for results, the better; but the measurement problems get harder as the numbers of cases get smaller. Dukenfield's Law ("Anything worth winning is worth cheating for") makes it necessary to guard against a variety of ways to game the scoring system. Accountability is no panacea. Probation departments, in particular, are so badly starved for both resources and authority that dramatic improvements can't really be expected without changes in budgets and laws. But right now the link between probation budgets and crime rates hasn't been established. In the absence of outcome measures that elected leaders care about, making the political case for the necessary changes will remain virtually impossible. Mayors must learn to ask, and probation commissioners must be able to answer the question, "How much will it cost me to get the re-arrest rate down by 10 percent, and what's that going to do for the overall crime rate?" When they can do that, the battle won't be won, but at least we'll be ready to start fighting it. Mark A.R. Kleiman is professor of policy studies at UCLA and chairman of BOTEC Analysis Corp. in Cambridge, Mass.

Blue Ribbon Sentencng commission collapses, by Robert Lawson, UK Law faculty.

Paschal:

Pardon me for being slow in getting back to you on this question. As we near the end of the semester, things get very busy and I have been in and out of my office for the last week and excessively busy. Sorry.

The Blue Ribbon Sentencing Commission went up in smoke, in response to organized opposition from state prosecutors (led by Ray Larson, I believe, and Attorney General Stumbo). The Commission only had two meeting, the last of which was overwhelmed by attendance of prosecutors and law enforcement types. The Commission was a good idea, had a representative membership, but never got around to considering any of the problems. It never filed a report.

I'm not sure I can identify a "contact" person for you in Frankfort. The Chief Justice (Joe Lambert) is still interested in these problems, he was the one who took the initiative to form the Blue Ribbon Sentencing Commission, but its history is described above.

If I had to identify someone who would provide hope for some kind of reform effort, I would probably identify Rep. Kathy Stein (from Lexington) or Sen. Robert Stivers (Manchester) as persons who understand the importance of these issues and might be able to withstand the pressure from anti-reform forces. As you may know, Rep. Stein is the chair of the House Judiciary Committee (where criminal law reform would locate itself); she came to see me right before the last session, got copies of my articles and indicated that she wanted to do something on this.

I think the session was so disjointed and fractured that nothing was done on anything. But I know she is interested. Senator Stivers (a Republican) is chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee; he was on the Blue Ribbon Sentencing Commission and was very unhappy about the way it collapsed. He wrote an angry letter to the Chief Justice (sending me a copy) blaming the Attorney General for the early collapse of the Commission. I have been told that there is another legislator who agrees with my assessment of the situation; he is Senator Dan Kelly from Springfield (one of the leaders in the Senate). This is the best I can do on giving you a "contact" in Frankfort.

I have been trying to get lawyers and judges interested in this problem. I have tried to generate interest in the organized bar but so far have not had a great deal of success. However, lots more of them now know about the problem than before I starting writing and preaching about the situation. And I have yet to encounter one (not in law enforcement or prosecution) who does not show concern.

The President of the Kentucky Bar Association is Robert Ewald; the Executive Director is James Deckard. Deckard was general counsel for Chief Justice Lambert when the Sentencing Commission was formed and he knows of these problems. The Kentucky Bar Association could be a significant force for motivating law and policy makers to look at reform if the Association would examine the problem (as I have asked) and take a
public position (providing some wiggle room for political leaders who must do the reform itself).

If you get your movement underway, the Bar Association would be one place where you might exert some meaningful nfluence (just by letting this group know that Bob Lawson is not the only voice of concern in this area). I think the Interfaith Alliance group would be one whose voice might be heard.

Hope this helps some. Bob Lawson

DELAWARE House OKs sentencing reform bill, Apr 4, 2007

Wednesday, April 4, 2007
Delaware House OKs sentencing reform bill
By Drew Volturo, Delaware State News

DOVER — After a lengthy debate that pitted police officers and prosecutors against defense attorneys and retired judges, the state House of Representatives passed a bill Tuesday eliminating minimum mandatory sentencing for drug offenders.

House Bill 71, which passed 26-13 after a two-hour debate, would change mandatory prison sentences to presumptive terms left to the discretion of the sentencing judge.

Under existing state law, a judge must impose the minimum mandatory sentence provided in the statute. The presiding officer cannot weigh any mitigating factors to possibly lessen the prison term.

“Minimum mandatory sentencing transfers sentencing power from judges to the prosecuting attorneys,” said Edmund N. “Ned” Carpenter II, a former defense attorney and deputy attorney general and past president of the Delaware State Bar Association.

“It gives the prosecuting attorney the power to threaten the defendant if he doesn’t plead guilty to various charges.”

House Speaker Rep. Terry R. Spence, R-New Castle, said he sponsored HB 71 because the debate surrounding minimum mandatory sentencing has been brewing for several years but never made it to the House floor.

“Hearing both sides, I felt that the time has come this year for this issue to be fully discussed on the floor,” Rep. Spence said.

“The sentiment from the majority of the House was to put the final decision in a judge’s hands.”

But members of the law enforcement community, including the attorney general’s office and the Delaware Police Chiefs’ Council, said the sentencing statute applies mainly to the “worst of the worse,” and is an effective tool for them to use.

State Prosecutor Richard Andrews said of 6,300 drug arrests in 2005, minimum mandatory sentencing was only applied to 133 convicts.

“Mandatory sentencing is being handed out to people who rightly deserve to spend at least a couple years in prison,” Mr. Andrews said.

“By weakening the drug laws, our streets are going to become more violent and we will see more crime,” said Newport Police Chief Michael Capriglione, president of the Delaware Police Chief’s Council.

Dover Police Chief Jeffrey Horvath brought props with him to testify before the House Tuesday.

The chief, who has said numerous times that he believes 90 percent of all crimes are drug-related in some fashion, held up a baggie with 10 grams of crack cocaine, which sells for $500 on the streets.

“Almost all of the shootings in Dover are related to this,” Chief Horvath said. “This is a violent crime and my stats prove it.

“Mandatory sentencing makes it fair for everyone who can’t afford a (high-priced) attorney.”

Chief Horvath said police would “have to work a hell of a lot harder” if the bill passes because drug dealers would be on the streets quicker.

Retired Wilmington police officer Rep. Dennis P. Williams, D-Wilmington, said minimum mandatory sentencing provides a necessary tool for police to get additional information from suspects and often leads to bigger arrests.

“They put themselves in this position,” Rep. Williams said. “I don’t see the big issue here. This is just a lot of fanfare.

“It’s a bad piece of legislation.”

Former state Supreme Court justice Joseph T. Walsh said judges already have a great deal of discretion in sentencing when it comes to capital murder cases. The judge can go against a 12-0 recommendation for death.

Judges, Mr. Walsh said, take that responsibility seriously.

“In each of those situations, I held a person’s liberty literally in my hand,” Mr. Walsh said. “I had an obligation to impose a fair sentence, fair to the defendant and fair to society.

“It’s a very difficult balance. With the advent of minimum mandatory sentencing, there is no balance. The focus is entirely on the offense.”

A similar measure died in the House last year when the chamber did not act on it.

Opponents to the proposal have noted that the General Assembly approved a bill a few years ago that reduced mandatory minimum sentences for lesser drug crimes, and that there’s no need for further action.

That 2003 law increased minimum mandatory sentences for violent crimes such as manslaughter, but lowered minimum terms for some drug offenses and increased the minimum weight of cocaine needed to establish the crime of trafficking from 5 grams to 10 grams.

The actual vote in the House Tuesday was delayed by about 20 minutes when legislators and attorneys couldn’t agree on how many votes were needed for passage.

The chamber typically has 41 members, which means that it would take 21 votes to pass most legislation.

But there currently are two vacancies, which raised the issue of whether it would take only 20 votes to clear the House.

Four House attorneys split in their interpretation of state law, so acting speaker Rep. William A. Oberle Jr., R-Newark, decided it would take 21 votes.

In the end, it didn’t matter, as HB 71 got 26 votes in favor.

The bill goes to the Senate for consideration.

Gov. Ruth Ann Minner said she is receptive to the idea of eliminating minimum mandatory sentencing but needs to see the final version of the legislation before deciding whether to sign it.

“We’ll see how it comes to us,” Gov. Minner said. “It has three amendments attached to it already.”

Post your opinions in the Public Issues Forum at newszap.com

Staff writer Drew Volturo

can be reached at 741-8296

or dvolturo@newszap.com

Worst Crisis in US is faced by Black Men, according to National Urban League

Published on Tuesday, April 17, 2007 by Associated Press

Group Says Worst Crisis in US Faced by Black Men

by David Crary

NEW YORK — Citing bleak data on incarceration, joblessness, and AIDS, the National Urban League said yesterday that problems facing black men represent America’s most serious social crisis and proposed an aggressive campaign to provide them with more opportunities.The 97-year-old black empowerment organization, in its annual State of Black America report, called for universal early-childhood education, more programs for dropouts and former offenders, and expanded use of all-male schools emphasizing mentoring and longer class hours.

“Empowering black men to reach their full potential is the most serious economic and civil rights challenge we face today,” said Urban League president Marc H. Morial.

“Ensuring their future is critical, not just for the African-American community, but for the prosperity, health, and well-being of the entire American family.”

According to the report, African-American men are more than twice as likely to be unemployed as white males.

They are nearly seven times more likely to be incarcerated, with average jail sentences about 10 months longer than those of white men, the report said.

In addition, it said, black males ages 15 to 34 are nine times more likely than whites to be killed by firearms and nearly eight times as likely to have AIDS.

“I could rattle off the names of African-American men who have overcome the odds . . . But for all the Barack Obamas, Tony Dungys, and Colin Powells out there . . . there are many more black men who face very limited opportunities,” Morial said.

© Copyright 2007 Associated Press

---

Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/04/17/577/

Presidential Candidates ignore the failed drug war.

DEAFENING SILENCE OF DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATES

by Arianna Huffington, Huffington Post

While all the top candidates are vying for the black and Latino vote, they are completely ignoring one of the most pressing issues affecting those constituencies: the failed War on Drugs, a war that has morphed into a war on people of color.

Consider this: according to a 2006 ACLU report, African Americans make up 15 percent of drug users, but account for 37 percent of those arrested on drug charges, 59 percent of those convicted, and 74 percent of all drug offenders sentenced to prison. Or consider this: America has 260,000 people in state prisons on nonviolent drug charges; 183,200 (more than 70 percent) are black or Latino.

Such facts and figures have been bandied about for years. But what to do about the legion of nonviolent -- predominantly minority -- drug offenders has long been an electrified third-rail in American politics, a subject to be avoided at all costs by our political leaders, who fear being incinerated on contact for being soft on crime.

You might have thought this would change during a spirited Democratic presidential campaign. But a quick search of the top Democratic hopefuls' websites reveals that not one of them -- not Hillary Clinton, not Barack Obama, not John Edwards, not Joe Biden, not Chris Dodd, not Bill Richardson -- even mentions the drug war, let alone offers any solutions.

The silence coming from Clinton and Obama is particularly deafening.

Obama has written eloquently about his own struggle with drugs, but has not addressed the tragic effect the war on drugs is having on African American communities.

As for Clinton, she flew into Selma to reinforce her image as the wife of "the first black president," and has made much of her plan to attract female voters, but has ignored the suffering of poor, black women right in her own backyard.

Located down the road from her Chappaqua home are two prisons housing female inmates, Taconic and Bedford. Forty-eight percent of the women in Taconic are there for nonviolent drug offenses; 78% of those in the prison are African-American or Hispanic. And Bedford, the state's only maximum security prison for women, is home to some of the worst victims of New York's draconian Rockefeller drug laws -- mothers and grandmothers whose first brush with the law resulted in their being locked away for 15 years or more on nonviolent drug charges.

Yet even though these prisons are so nearby, Clinton has turned a blind eye to the plight of the women locked away there, notably refusing to speak out on their behalf.

Our political leaders' avoidance of this issue comes with a very stiff price (and not just the more than $50 billion a year we're spending on the failed drug war). The toll is paid in shattered families, devastated inner cities, and wasted lives (with no apologies for using that term).

During the ten years I've been writing about the injustice of the drug war, I've repeatedly seen politicians pay lip service to doing something about it, then duck and watch as the sickening status quo claimed more victims. Here in California, of the 171,000 inmates jamming our wildly overcrowded prisons, 36,000 are nonviolent drug offenders.

I remember in 1999 asking Dan Bartlett, then the campaign spokesman for candidate George Bush, about Bush's position on the outrageous disparity between the sentences meted out for possession of crack and those given for possession of powder cocaine - a disparity that has helped fill America's prisons with black low-level drug users. Federal sentencing guidelines dictate that judges impose the same five-year prison sentence for possession of five grams of crack or 500 grams of powder cocaine.

"The different sentencing for crack cocaine and powder cocaine is something that there's no doubt needs to be addressed," Bartlett told me. But in the more than six years since Bush and Bartlett moved into the White House, the problem has gone unaddressed. No doubt about it.

Maybe the president will suddenly wake up and decide to take on the issue five days before he leaves office. That's what Bill Clinton did, writing a 2001 New York Times op-ed in which he trumpeted the need to "immediately reduce the disparity between crack and powder cocaine sentences" -- conveniently putting aside the fact that he had the power to solve it for eight years and did nothing.

When it mattered, he maintained an imperial silence. Then, when it didn't, he became Captain Courageous. And he lamented the failures of our drug policy, acting as though he had been an innocent bystander rather than the chief executive presiding over these failures (indeed, the prison population doubled on his watch).

As a result of our political leaders' neglect, the disparity has continued to wreak havoc on the black community. Even though the majority of crack users are white or Hispanic, 80% of sentenced crack defendants are black. The injustice is so egregious that a conservative Republican senator, Jeff Sessions, is now leading the charge in Congress to ease crack sentences.

"I believe that as a matter of law enforcement and good public policy crack cocaine sentences are too heavy and can't be justified," says Sessions. "People don't want us to be soft on crime, but I think we ought to make the law more rational."

There's a talking point Hillary and Obama should adopt. It's both the right thing and the smart thing. Because of disenfranchisement statues, large numbers of black men who were convicted of drug crimes are ineligible to vote, even those who have fully paid their debt to society. A 2000 study found that 1.4 million African American men -- 13 percent of the total black male population -- were unable to vote in the 2000 election because of state laws barring felons access to the polls. In Florida, one in three black men is permanently disqualified from voting. Think that might have made a difference in the 2000 race? Our short-sighted drug laws have become the 21st Century manifestation of Jim Crow.

Shouldn't this be an issue Democratic presidential candidates deem worthy of their attention?

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/the-other-war-democratic_b_44063.html

Prisons Don't Work, study group concludes

http://www.heartland.org/pdf/48301a.pdf

Fletcher promised Reforms for Justice programs, 2004.

KENTUCKY SEES REFORM FOR JUSTICE PROGRAMS

Crime Control Digest, Jan 30, 2004

Kentucky Gov. Ernie Fletcher has outlined a broad program of criminal justice reform that would include s reorganization of state police, prisons and courts and increased emphasis on drug offenses.

Kentucky also proposes eliminating the forensics backlog at the state police crime laboratories.

Lt. Gov. Steve Pence who supervises the State Police outlined the plan for the state crime laboratory in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Pence said the lab used a federal grant to hire two additional analysts and initiated a plan to reduce the number of tests. The lab would accept crime scene tests when they appeared to be adequate for the prosecution and would stop drug samples when a defendant agrees to enter a guilty plea.

Pence said the governor would reorganize the state police, corrections and juvenile justice agencies into a single public safety agency.

In a major change of direction, the governor would provide community-based treatment for drug offenders to reduce the prison population, head off the need to construct a new 1,000-bed facility and cut correctional costs.

Kentucky is one of the few states with beds available, but its population of 11,900 is approaching operational capacity of 12,162. About 3,600 are serving sentences for drug offenses.

The governor estimates drug treatment would cost an average of about $5,000 for each offender compared to an average of $13,600 the state spent for minimum-security prisoners in 2003 and an average of $17,294 for all prisoners.

The administration said drug treatment is expensive, but is cheaper and more effective than prison. The prison alternative also keeps drug offenders in the workforce and can stabilize families.

Expansion of drug courts and community treatment would also allow the state to postpone the scheduled June opening of the new $90 million Elliot County prison.

The drug treatment program would be part of a comprehensive attack on Kentucky's drug program that the state hopes to begin to put into place by mid-summer.

State health officials estimate 22,000 Kentuckians underwent substance abuse treatment last year and an estimated 348,000 have a substance abuse problem. Based on the Census Bureau's 2003 estimates that would be 8 percent of Kentucky's total population of 4.1 million persons.

Copyright Washington Crime News Service Jan 30, 2004
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved

KY county Jails: overview: 72% overcrowded.

A report from the State Auditor, Crit Luallen,
KENTUCKY JAILS: A FINANCIAL OVERVIEW
February 2006 in two volumes
www.auditor.ky.gov.
Summary by Rev. Dr. Paschal Baute

OVERCROWDING EXISTS IN MORE THAN TWO OUT OF THREE OF OUR COUNTY JAILS. We treat drug and alcohol problems in Kentucky mainly by incarceration.

"This study was undertaken after numerous independent county government officials voiced concerns about rising costs of incarceration. In some instances as much as 45% of the county's general fund budget is being dedicated annually to cover local jail expenditures.

Highlights of the Executive Summary.

Kentucky had the nation's 5th highest percentage growth in inmate population in 2004. We ranked second nationally in percentage of State and Federal inmates held.

County Jails. Official capacity is 15,667, but the average is 2000 inmates higher. County jails cost $244 million in fiscal year 2005/

No systematic accounting method exists: costs and expenditures are not well tracked.

Cost of operating jails varies widely, with cost per day ranging from $19. To $84. With an average cost of 36.

Personnel costs, food costs and Health costs all vary widely

Food costs vary from .65/ Per meal to 4.66

Many counties believe that expanding their jails and attracting more state inmates will reduce the overall burden of costs.

Life - Safety jails are expensive to operate.

Overcrowding exists in 53 of the 73 full service and regional jails.

Management of medical costs is a major challenge. State reimbursement is inherently unfair, as some counties actually profit ... from this procedure.

Inconsistency in accounting for inmate fees creates an opportunity for additional revenue, as past due accounts reported total $22 million.

In 2005, the state paid $9.2 milliin less than its proportionate share of costs based on its share of inmate days.

The state's practice of leaving state prisoners in county jails (via controlled intake) or placing state prisoners in county jails either exacerbates or causes overcrowding in 53 of the state's full service and regional jails. Continued overcrowding may lead to federal lawsuits and liability issues.

(Paschal’s note: this ratio means that overcrowding exists in 72% of the county jails, that is, more than two out of three. I have offered volunteer programs in ministry and treatment for addiction in one county jail three times in 2005, and have not yet received either a hearing or even a review of a program well established and recommended by the staff, in the Fayette County Detention Center. I brought this fact to the Corrections Director’s attention at a Prison Ministry and Prison Reform conference organized by the local Catholic Conference in Lexington last fall. His response was that this refusal was against correctional policy.)

Auditors Recommendations are 14 in number and involve the Department of Corrections, other offices and the county jailors. "The lack of an integrated corrections system including the county jail means imbalance in he geographical distribution of facilities, the loss of opportunity fo rthe development of programming for subsets of the inmate population, such as drug or alcohol sbuse programs, unfair cost shifting to some local governments, and lost opportunity for improved efficiency and cost savings."

“It can be noted that the human cost of this inefficiency, overcrowding, and lack of programming to the inmate population is not addressed.”

Basically, Kentucky is treating ADI (Alcohol, Drug and Illegal Prescription substances) by incarceration. We are simply locking up our abusing citizens without any rehabilitation available. Since 80% of the offenses are ADI, we are jailing about ten to fifteen thousand addicts in our state. Recidivism averages about 60-70%. We have shown in the Drug Court programs in Fayette County that these return rates can be reduced to from 50% to 20%, depending on the oversight given.

Summary by Paschal Baute, March 15, 2006. These facts are taken from the Executive Summary, pp. 1-5 of Volume One. “Kentucky Jails: A Financial Overview” Auditors office. 105 Sea Hero Rd. Suite 2, Frankfort, Ky 40601. tel 502.573.0050

Rev. Dr. Paschal Baute, temporary chair, pastoral psychologist
Kentuckians Expecting Effective Justice (Corrections and Prisons) KEEJ
tel. 859-293-5302 Email pbbaute@qx.net. Www.paschalbaute.com

Incarceration is not an equal opportunity punishment

On December 31, 2005, there were 2,193,798 people in U.S. prisons and jails. The United States incarcerates a greater share of its population, 737 per 100,000 residents, than any other country on the planet. But when you break down the statistics you see that incarceration is not an equal opportunity punishment.

U.S. incarceration rates by race, June 30, 2004:

• Whites: 393 per 100,000
• Latinos: 957 per 100,000
• Blacks: 2,531 per 100,000

Gender is an important "filter" on the who goes to prison or jail, June 30, 2005:

• Females: 129 per 100,000
• Males: 1,371 per 100,000

Look at just the males by race, and the incarceration rates become even more frightening, June 30, 2005:

• White males: 709 per 100,000
• Latino males: 1,856 per 100,000
• Black males: 4,682 per 100,000

If you look at males aged 25-29 and by race, you can see what is going on even clearer, June 30, 2005:

• For White males ages 25-29: 1,682 per 100,000.
• For Latino males ages 25-29: 3,884 per 100,000.
• For Black males ages 25-29: 11,955 per 100,000. (That's 11.9% of Black men in their late 20s.)

Or you can make some international comparisons:
South Africa under Apartheid was internationally condemned as a racist society.

• South Africa under apartheid (1993), Black males: 851 per 100,000
• U.S. under George Bush (2004), Black males: 4,919 per 100,000

What does it mean that the leader of the "free world" locks up its Black males at a rate 5.8 times higher than the most openly racist country in the world?

Statistics as of June 30, 2005 from Prison and Jail Inmates at Midyear 2005, Table 13; Statistics as of June 30, 2004 from Prison and Jail Inmates at Midyear 2004, Tables 14; except for the race rate statistics which are calculated from Table 13 and Census Bureau population estimates. South Africa figures from Marc Mauer, Americans Behind Bars: The International Use of Incarceration. All references to Blacks and Whites are for what the Bureau of Justice Statistics and U.S. Census refer to as "non-Hispanic Blacks" and "non-Hispanic Whites".)

Source: http://www.prisonsucks.com/

Drug Policy, outcomes and effects, summarized and questioned

DRUG POLICY

Of America's 1.7 million prisoners, 1.4 million (80 percent) are incarcerated for drug or alcohol related offenses (alcohol is highly related to violent crime). We have imprisoned our children, turned our country into a gangland, and given up our most precious rights in the name of health! We fight a lost and immoral war instead of teaching our children values. Here are some problems with the policy of war on drugs:

• It cannot be won as a practical matter. It is exactly like Prohibition. It is a victimless crime. Large amounts of profit ensure it can never be stopped.
• It is prohibitively expensive as seen by statistics just for the jailing, let alone the enforcement. It criminalizes many who would not otherwise be, therefore it is a policy that cannot be moral. It is estimated that 78 million U.S. citizens have used illegal drugs. Should they all be barred from public office? Should they all be incarcerated? Laws that criminalize more than every third adult are not a good idea.
• A policy that disproportionately jails so many young black men cannot be moral. It is a racist policy. By pushing the price of drugs, it leads to gangs and the economic collapse of legitimate work and values. It leads to more violent crime as users try to raise the great amounts of money needed for their habits. It destroys an entire segment of society, which should never be tolerated. If these were afluent whites in gangs, the drug laws would be overturned immediately. (Something like the decriminalization of Marijuana). 13 percent of drug users are black and 74 percent of all sentenced to prison for drugs are black. (Scientifc American, August 1999, page 25)
• It causes the US to interfere in, abuse and destroy other countries like Columbia and Mexico, which is clearly immoral.
• It causes US citizens to give up rights which they otherwise would not. It leads to enforcement procedures like the use of informers which has a corrosive effect on the moral fiber of the country. The great money, an estimated 67 billion dollars a year, leads to the inevitable corruption of officials.
• Finally, the drug policy is immoral at its core. Everyone has the innate right to commit suicide. Therefore, any law enacted for safety or to protect the health of the users - like laws against suicide, smoking, alcohol, drugs - has no moral force. They are not permissible. It is simply some busybody telling you what to do. You wouldn't tolerate it from a jerk down the street, so you shouldn't tolerate it from a bunch of jerks down the street; Prudes imposing their rules on people they have no business bothering. Can it be moral to tell someone else how to live, when he is not bothering anybody? It is Big Brother. It is evil. If you are going to tell people how to live, why not be consistent and bring back Prohibition?
  
• 
  
• Alcohol is much worse healthwise than most other drugs. If health is the issue, how can it be healthy to have citizens buy drugs from unreliable pushers, or fly-by-night labs, or use common needles? Impure drugs are not healthy. Are jails healthy? Since prisoners get drugs in jail, how have you improved their health? If you balance the supposed hypothetical good (health) from this busybody policy with the evident evil, no sane person could be for it. If you don't want your kids to do drugs, teach them, but do not imprison them; do not take away their rights; do not give up your rights.

Source: http://www.geocities.com/Pentagon/6315/law/prison.html

Effective Prisons Talking Points,

Prison Reform Talking Points

by REBECCA TUHUS-DUBROW

[posted online on December 19, 2003]

The US prison system is exacting an increasingly heavy toll, both financial and human. Surging numbers of prisons hold more than 2 million inmates, giving the United States the highest rate of incarceration in the world.

Over the past few decades, the dominant criminal justice philosophy dropped rehabilitation in favor of sequestration and retribution. Opportunities for education, job training and drug treatment have fallen out of fashion. "Three strikes" and minimum sentencing laws have led to excessive punishments for millions of nonviolent offenders, especially in the misguided "war on drugs."

Any assessment of the US prison system is incomplete without considering the prison-industrial complex, a network of private corporations with a direct interest in increasing the number of prisoners. Dovetailing with these interests are politicians exploiting tough-on-crime rhetoric that plays well at election time. The reality is that punitive incarceration policies are a relatively ineffective means of reducing crime, especially drug use.

Fortunately, many states are starting to recognize the system's failure and experiment with rehabilitative programs such as job training and drug treatment. These programs are yielding impressive results in the form of reduced recidivism rates and taxpayer costs. But alternative solutions are in constant jeopardy because of the prevailing, federally driven ideology.

Prison Reform Talking Points

1. The conditions of prisons are inhumane. In many prisons, inmates are victims of physical abuse and excessive disciplinary action. Overcrowding and double-bunking are widespread. At the same time, many "supermax" prisons subject inmates to prolonged isolation in tiny cells, which frequently fosters mental illness. Prisoners also tend to have inadequate access to physical and mental healthcare.

2. Prisons are "crime factories." Instead of curbing criminal tendencies, prisons encourage them. Violent and aggressive behavior is standard and even rewarded. It's clear that time served in such conditions regularly creates violent criminals from nonviolent ones.

3. Recidivism rates are exceedingly high. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, more than two-thirds of released prisoners are re-arrested within three years. These figures underline the ineffectiveness of prison as a deterrent and a reformer. They also lead to a related criticism of prison trends: Increasingly, people are re-arrested on technical parole violations, such as missing an appointment with a parole officer, and returned to the system more quickly than in the past.

4. Prisons are expensive. According to CBS News, taxpayers are paying an estimated $40 billion a year for prisons. Feeding and caring for an inmate costs about $20,000 a year on average, and construction costs are about $100,000 per cell. The demand to build more prisons has often siphoned funds from the few existing treatment and education programs, leading to a vicious circle in which more prisons are needed because, partly due to the lack of these programs, more prisoners continue to come back.

5. Most of the growth in prison population has been for nonviolent offenders, especially those convicted on drug charges. Because of mandatory sentencing laws, over half of today's inmates are incarcerated on drug charges, despite evidence that treatment programs are much more effective at preventing future drug offenses.

6. The combined effects of disenfranchisement laws, inmate population trends and economic realities perpetuate a racial divide in society. Prisoners are disproportionately from minority communities. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, based on current rates of incarceration an estimated 32 percent of black males will enter prison during their lifetime, compared with 17 percent of Hispanic males and 5.9 percent of white males. Once released, many prisoners lack job skills and face employer suspicion. In most states convicted felons are not allowed to vote from prison; in twelve states, felons are disenfranchised for life. These factors contribute to widespread unemployment in minority communities as well as disproportionately meager electoral representation.

7. Under draconian laws, people can end up in jail for life for nonviolent crimes. Because of the ascendancy of "three strikes" laws, for example in California, it is increasingly common for people to receive life sentences for offenses such as drug possession and welfare fraud.

8. Most prisoners will be released into society, and are not prepared by prisons to participate productively. The culture of parole has changed dramatically over the past generation. Now there is much less individualized consideration of how well prepared an inmate is to leave prison. Less help is provided to facilitate that preparation, and fewer parole officers are available to ease the transition back into the community. Such trends are especially dangerous in light of the mental illness and violent tendencies that result from prison conditions.

http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20040105&s=tuhusdubrow