Criminal Justice – Page 24

We’re Exceptional, All Right

Nicholas Kristof recently reported on the consequences of a Texas drug sweep. He began by asking readers to pretend that they’re the judge:

She’s a 32-year-old mom with a 9-year-old daughter and no prior arrests, but she has been caught up in a drug sweep that has led to 105 arrests in her Texas town. Everyone arrested is black.

There are no drugs found on Jones, but her supposed co-conspirators testify against her in exchange for reduced sentences. The whole case is dubious, but she has been convicted. What’s your sentence?

You have little choice. Given the presumptions of the case, she gets a mandatory minimum sentence of life without the possibility of parole. Jump to today and already Jones has spent 14 years in prison and is expected to die behind bars — for a first offense.

This isn’t, unfortunately, an anomaly. America currently has 3,278 people serving life sentences for nonviolent drug and property crimes. In twenty percent of those cases, it was the person’s first offense.

Welcome to mandatory minimum sentencing.

Welcome to laws that don’t allow judges to judge, to calibrate sentences to the specifics of the case before them. Laws that give frustrated jurists no choice but to impose draconian penalties no matter how outrageously disproportionate or unjust they believe those penalties to be.

Welcome to “getting tough on crime” — and of course, welcome to the War on Drugs.

We’re talking about crimes like possession of a crack pipe. Or acting as a go-between in a drug sale. Or trying to cash a stolen check, or shoplifting. Or sharing LSD at a Grateful Dead concert. The estimated cost of imprisoning these 3,278 people for life–rather than for a more reasonable period, one more proportionate to the crime–is calculated to be 1.78 billion dollars.

Sequester that, Boehner!

As the warden of the Louisiana State Penitentiary said, “I need to keep predators in these big old prisons, not dying old men.”

This is flat-out insane. It is wasteful of lives and money, and appallingly inhumane. If we read about similar practices in another country, we’d condemn that system (and smugly congratulate ourselves for our own moral superiority).

We’re exceptional, all right. And evidently incapable of shame.

Comments

Still the Poster Child for Stupid Policy

The most recent newsletter of the ACLU has a report on the costs of incarceration, including the staggering amounts paid to enforce marijuana prohibition. In 2010, the states spent 3.6 billion dollars and made one pot arrest every 37 seconds. And how did this aggressive enforcement work out? Marijuana use increased.

Think about that next time state governments wail about not having enough money to support public education, pave highways, or provide other necessary services.

As I have noted previously, the nation could save an amount equal to the cuts made by sequestration just by substituting sensible regulations for our disastrous drug war.

Current laws are wildly illogical for all sorts of reasons.

The biggest problem with the War on Drugs is that it is being fought on the wrong battlefield. Drug abuse is a public health issue. Behaviors connected to the use of drugs–driving while impaired, theft to support a habit, etc.–should be addressed by the criminal law, but the mere use of a substance deemed harmful is a health issue, and should be addressed as a health issue. (Speaking of health, marijuana is actually less harmful to users than tobacco, yet we have wildly different approaches to pot and tobacco use–undoubtedly the result of a much more effective tobacco lobby. According to police officers I know, people who use pot are significantly less likely to become violent than people who abuse alcohol, yet we outlaw pot, but regulate and tax alcohol and tobacco.)

Current laws are financially ruinous. The US spends roughly 60 billion dollars annually on drug prohibition, and we get virtually no bang for those bucks because the “war” is ineffective. We also forgo collection of billions of dollars in potential tax revenues that we would collect if we simply taxed pot like we treat alcohol and tobacco. We waste criminal justice resources that would be better used elsewhere, to treat drug abuse or to deter nonconsensual crimes that actually harm others.

Drug prohibition has focused disproportionately on African-American and Latino neighborhoods, exacerbating racial tensions. Black people are almost four times more likely to be arrested for possession of marijuana than their white neighbors, despite statistics confirming comparable levels of use–and the ACLU reports that the disparity in some counties grows to as much as 30 times!

We’ve lost this war. Not that the War on Drugs has ever been effective; the percentage of Americans who use hard drugs is pretty much the same as it has always been. Pot use has ebbed and flowed over time, providing the only real changes in the numbers. Thirty plus years of research has consistently demonstrated the utter failure of American drug policy, and the error of the premises upon which it has been constructed. (Pot smokers become hard drug users in about the same percentages as milk drinkers do, and we don’t outlaw milk as a “gateway drug.”) The only thing the Drug War has done effectively is ruin the lives of (disproportionately black) teenagers who are imprisoned for non-violent drug crimes.

What is frustrating is the number of policymakers who respond to this mountain of evidence with a renewed enthusiasm for measures that have consistently failed.

Comments

Shameful

Forget the arguments about whether water boarding is torture. The Guardian has now uncovered irrefutable evidence of full-scale torture during the Iraq War, conducted by Americans under the direct orders of Donald Rumsfeld. The story also implicates General Petraeus.

The Guardian/BBC Arabic investigation was sparked by the release of classified US military logs on WikiLeaks that detailed hundreds of incidents where US soldiers came across tortured detainees in a network of detention centres run by the police commandos across Iraq. Private Bradley Manning, 25, is facing a prison sentence of up to 20 years after he pleaded guilty to leaking the documents.

Samari claimed that torture was routine in the SPC-controlled detention centres. “I remember a 14-year-old who was tied to one of the library’s columns. And he was tied up, with his legs above his head. Tied up. His whole body was blue because of the impact of the cables with which he had been beaten.”

It was bad enough when we could believe that Abu Ghraib and the like were products of “rogue” behavior. But the Guardian provides evidence that torture was a deliberate policy, an intentional tactic employed by high-ranking Bush Administration officials–the same officials who justified America’s invasion of Iraq by pointing to Sadaam’s use of torture against his own people. The same officials who repeatedly proclaimed America’s moral superiority.

Why do I suspect that the people who routinely pontificate about “American Exceptionalism” will try to excuse and defend the indefensible?

Why is Bradley Manning going to jail for whistle-blowing?

Why have Donald Rumsfeld and his co-conspirators escaped prosecution for war crimes? And what did Dick Cheney know, and when did he know it?

Comments

While We Are Wringing Our Hands….

While we wait for the impact of sequestration to hit, we might ponder this: In an interview with Spiegel Online, a Harvard economist insisted that we could save an amount equal to the sequestration cuts every year just by ending the War on Drugs.

“The prohibition of drugs is the worst solution for preventing abuse,” said Professor Jeffrey Miron. “Firstly, it brings about a black market that is corrupt and costs human lives. Secondly, it constrains people who wouldn’t abuse drugs. Thirdly, prohibiting drugs is expensive.”

I have made this point before.

The direct costs of our counterproductive drug war have been estimated at more than 60 billion dollars a year. And yet, in all the years we have pursued this war, we have not reduced the percentage of Americans using hard drugs. Instead, that sixty billion dollars a year has destroyed lives, incentivized criminal activity, increased police corruption, laid waste to several South American countries, and decimated inner city neighborhoods.

If our elected officials are really so intent upon reducing the national debt, wouldn’t it make more sense to stop spending enormous sums for a failed policy, and use at least some of the savings for treatment? Better still, we could legalize marijuana–which medical experts tell us is less dangerous than booze–and tax it.

I don’t know whether we’d save more than the sequester, but abandoning a failed, horrifically expensive program would be a far more rational approach than taking an indiscriminate, meat ax approach to the budget.

Comments

Two Sides of the Issue

The question of DNA testing is evidently coming before the Supreme Court this year. The issue is whether taking DNA from someone who has not been convicted of a crime is a violation of that person’s constitutional right to privacy, to bodily integrity.

You would think that a committed civil libertarian would be opposed to this practice, and perhaps if I knew more about the various situations in which the DNA is collected, and the arguments against its use, I would be. But I am very conflicted.

Unlike fingerprints, which are notoriously unreliable, DNA samples analyzed correctly are accurate. Because they are accurate, they prove innocence as well as guilt–DNA evidence has exonerated literally hundreds of people serving time for crimes they did not commit. It has saved countless others the trauma and expense of trials.

Furthermore, the procedures used to collect DNA are not particularly invasive. Typically, a quick swab of the inside of one’s cheek is all that is required–no more time-consuming than rolling fingers in ink and placing them on a surface capable of accepting the transfer, and barely more intrusive.

That said, there’s a legitimate concern that information from DNA and other identity markers can be abused. An effort to collect DNA from the citizenry at large would constitute serious overreach; it would tempt unethical officials to misuse the information, and identity thieves to steal it.

But what about routinely taking DNA samples from people who are arrested? The argument is that a national DNA bank would allow authorities to solve crimes like rape much more quickly, arguably preventing perpetrators from committing additional crimes before getting caught.

The 4th Amendment was crafted long before modern technology; we have to look to its purpose to determine how it should apply to these modern scientific marvels at our disposal. If taking someone’s DNA is a “search,” what is the probable cause, the legal justification, for that search? Can an arrest for some minor infraction provide that justification? Probably not.

I welcome comments and lessons from readers who know more about this issue than I do, because I see both sides of the argument. The positive results of expanded testing would seem to outweigh the negatives, but–especially in Constitutional law–the ends cannot justify otherwise forbidden means.

There are some very good lawyers who comment on this blog from time to time. I need your help now! What am I missing?

Comments