CAMPAIGN TO REFORM NY DRUG LAWS KICKS OFF WITH PANEL
By Davina Cohen
Freelance reporter
The “Drop the Rock” campaign to reform New York State’s laws on drug-related offenses, held its first event on Thursday, March 1st at the New York Society for Ethical Culture in Manhattan. The evening featured a wide-ranging panel including criminal justice policy experts, an award-winning journalist, a youth organizer, religious leaders, and a former drug offender imprisoned under the Rockefeller Drug Laws. The panelists unanimously agreed that reform was necessary and each discussed their own contributions to the struggle to change the legal penalties and treatment options for offenders.
BRIEF HISTORY OF THE ROCKEFELLER DRUG LAWS
Governor Nelson Rockefeller signed the nation’s harshest legal standards for drug-related offences into law just seven months prior to his resignation, prompting widespread criticism that he had passed the laws not in the interest of public good, but in the hopes of appearing tough on crime to advance his political career. Despite evidence suggesting their ineffectiveness in deterring drug-related crime, and the increase in New York’s prison population from an estimated 12,500 to 71,000 according to the Correctional Association of New York, the laws have remained unaltered and heavily enforced for the last 28 years.
The “Drop the Rock” panel was moderated by Nation editor Kristina vanden Heuvel and actor and champion of numerous social causes, Danny Glover. Putting the Rockefeller Drug Laws on the cutting room floor represented “one of the boldest gestures” of Pataki’s term as governor, vanden Heuvel said, bemoaning the fact that what to many seemed overdue appeared bold in the context of New York’s political history. She cited panelist Michael Massing, author of The Fix, a study of U.S. drug policy since the 1960s, as one of the few journalists to take a critical approach towards the “war on drugs”.
U.S FEDERAL DRUG POLICY AND THE “WAR ON DRUGS”
Massing gave a brief overview of the current political climate surrounding national drug policy, which he said was ripe for a change in direction. “In 1973, New York was the first state to set mandatory minimum sentence laws and every state followed [its lead]. If New York reforms [its laws now], other states may follow.” Massing said. He described how some of the country’s most prominent conservative politicians and commentators, including Republican Governor of New Mexico Gary Johnson and Newsweek columnist George Will, have crossed party lines to join treatment advocates in criticizing U.S. drug policy.
Massing spoke critically of Plan Colombia, a program designed by the Colombian government to obtain over $3 billion in aid, mostly from the U.S., to help end the country’s human rights crisis. The Plan has been widely criticized by international organizations including Amnesty International for being too focused on the role of the illicit drug trade in Colombia’s present human rights situation and for overemphasizing military strategy, particularly with respect to U.S. involvement.
Couching his criticism of the Plan and other elements of U.S. federal drug policy in terms of a need to “move from a criminal approach to a public health approach” to drug policy, Massing concluded, “We have an amazing treatment gap in this country…[in which]…over two million people [in the U.S.] who could benefit from treatment…aren’t getting any.”
COMMUNITY AND CLERGY LEADERS URGE FOR REFORM
The four community leaders who spoke on the panel echoed Massing’s call for a treatment-based approach to the drug problem. The Reverend Calvin O. Butts, Pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, described a popular attitude among poor urban communities, those most affected by the Rockefeller Drug laws, which he argued led to the communities’ initial acceptance of the tough legislation. Distressed by the high incidence of drug-related violence in their communities, people in Harlem and elsewhere cried “to lock [the perpetrators] up and throw away the key,” Butts explained. Lacking a better solution and wanting to appease these communities, “politicians jumped on the bandwagon,” argued Butts.
Poverty became the centerpiece of Butts’s speech and of the speeches that followed from Bishop James F. McCarthy of the Archdiocese of New York, former prisoner Elaine Bartlett, youth activist Tasha Williams, Assemblymember Jeffrion Aubry, and policy analysts Ron Daniels and Robert Gangi Executive Directors of the Center for Constitutional Rights and the Correctional Association of New York, respectively.
Bartlett was the evening’s most provocative speaker and received a standing ovation. Her main point was that a purely punitive system without treatment, education, and family support programs do more harm than good in solving the drug problem. “When you lock a person up for 16 years, you lock up [their family as well]…The punishment does not fit the crime…[The first-time offenders] are not the ones who are bringing drugs into the community.” Bartlett said that she was treated “like an animal” while imprisoned for delivering four ounces of cocaine, her first offence. She described her children as having felt “abandoned” and told of her difficulty reintegrating into society. “I had to go on 52 interviews before I could get a job,” Bartlett said after explaining that she only received an education equivalent to an “8th grade reading level” while in prison.
THE DILEMMA OF A PRISON ECONOMY AND “INSTITUIONALIZED RACISM”
Bartlett’s speech provided a backdrop to Gangi’s and Daniels’s call to action. Speaking passionately about the need for the development of a more effective social service infrastructure for underserved urban populations, Daniels implored the audience to understand “the struggle to reform the Rockefeller Drug Laws” as “part of a bigger change”.
Daniels passed the torch to his policy analyst cohort, Gangi, who argued that, “the ‘war on drugs’ is not a war by middle class people of any color against white middle class drug users and sellers; it is a war against poor communities of color.” Gangi cited the statistic that 94 percent of drug users and sellers are white, but that 85 percent of New York’s prisoners are black and Latino. The Correctional Association of New York estimates the total number of drug offenders in New York state prisons at 22,300.
“Prisons function as a source of economic development for upstate white communities…a community the size of Ithaca [has been] relocated [from downstate New York] to upstate white communities,” said Gangi. He argued that the effects of current drug policy constitute the “institutionalized subjugation of one race by another” and that drug policy reform “would take the first important steps in reversing a policy of…racism undertaken by our government.”
Gangi and Bartlett made note of the related problems and effects of census-taking in New York state, in which upstate prisoners are counted as residents of their prison’s location, dislocating funds that would otherwise have gone to their home communities. Critical of the state’s financial investments in prisons in lieu of treatment programs and on the upstate economy’s reliance on the industry created by prison development, Bartlett asked in desperation, “What about us?”
PROSPECTS FOR REFORM
Jeffrion Aubry, Democratic Assemblymember from the 35th district in Harlem and chair of the Committee on Corrections, spoke in vague terms about the possibilities for reform. He and the other panelists emphasized a restoration of judicial discretion in sentencing and treatment options, a general reduction in sentencing, the enhancement of a treatment program, the implementation of a life skills program for prisoners, and the redistribution of funds presently allocated for prisons towards abuse prevention and treatment programs both inside and outside prisons. They are up against strong opposition from many district attorneys who see a decrease in their discretionary powers on the horizon and an enduring fear on the part of Democratic legislators (the most obvious proponents of reform) of appearing “soft on crime” and losing the confidence of their electorates.
Aubry maintained that all proposals for reforms to date were insufficient and that the likelihood of the introduction of overly lenient reforms was slim. “If there were any policy changes too lenient, I would have put them out there because I am probably the most lenient around,” said Aubry in an interview after the panel. When asked about the prospects for introducing reforms that will address the current deficiencies in the law and attend to the broader issues of urban poverty stressed by the other panelists, Aubry responded with some hesitation, “We don’t have a groundswell to deal with [poverty]...”
CAN THE “WAR ON DRUGS” GIVE WAY TO A PEACEFUL POLICY?
New Yorkers and others anticipating nation-wide reform (California voters demanded treatment instead of prison for nonviolent offenders last year) wait for the groundswell to occur and have events planned including an upcoming lobby day and education forum in Albany to speed up the process. The battle over an effective and just drug policy has begun and “Drop the Rock” campaigners are poised in all their uniforms – as policy wonks, clergy, grassroots organizers, attorneys and judges, and survivors of the system – to advance into new territory, hoping their opponents see sense in a swift surrender.CAMPAIGN TO REFORM NY DRUG LAWS KICKS OFF WITH PANEL
By Davina Cohen
Freelance reporter
The “Drop the Rock” campaign to reform New York State’s laws on drug-related offenses, held its first event on Thursday, March 1st at the New York Society for Ethical Culture in Manhattan. The evening featured a wide-ranging panel including criminal justice policy experts, an award-winning journalist, a youth organizer, religious leaders, and a former drug offender imprisoned under the Rockefeller Drug Laws. The panelists unanimously agreed that reform was necessary and each discussed their own contributions to the struggle to change the legal penalties and treatment options for offenders.
BRIEF HISTORY OF THE ROCKEFELLER DRUG LAWS
Governor Nelson Rockefeller signed the nation’s harshest legal standards for drug-related offences into law just seven months prior to his resignation, prompting widespread criticism that he had passed the laws not in the interest of public good, but in the hopes of appearing tough on crime to advance his political career. Despite evidence suggesting their ineffectiveness in deterring drug-related crime, and the increase in New York’s prison population from an estimated 12,500 to 71,000 according to the Correctional Association of New York, the laws have remained unaltered and heavily enforced for the last 28 years.
The “Drop the Rock” panel was moderated by Nation editor Kristina vanden Heuvel and actor and champion of numerous social causes, Danny Glover. Putting the Rockefeller Drug Laws on the cutting room floor represented “one of the boldest gestures” of Pataki’s term as governor, vanden Heuvel said, bemoaning the fact that what to many seemed overdue appeared bold in the context of New York’s political history. She cited panelist Michael Massing, author of The Fix, a study of U.S. drug policy since the 1960s, as one of the few journalists to take a critical approach towards the “war on drugs”.
U.S FEDERAL DRUG POLICY AND THE “WAR ON DRUGS”
Massing gave a brief overview of the current political climate surrounding national drug policy, which he said was ripe for a change in direction. “In 1973, New York was the first state to set mandatory minimum sentence laws and every state followed [its lead]. If New York reforms [its laws now], other states may follow.” Massing said. He described how some of the country’s most prominent conservative politicians and commentators, including Republican Governor of New Mexico Gary Johnson and Newsweek columnist George Will, have crossed party lines to join treatment advocates in criticizing U.S. drug policy.
Massing spoke critically of Plan Colombia, a program designed by the Colombian government to obtain over $3 billion in aid, mostly from the U.S., to help end the country’s human rights crisis. The Plan has been widely criticized by international organizations including Amnesty International for being too focused on the role of the illicit drug trade in Colombia’s present human rights situation and for overemphasizing military strategy, particularly with respect to U.S. involvement.
Couching his criticism of the Plan and other elements of U.S. federal drug policy in terms of a need to “move from a criminal approach to a public health approach” to drug policy, Massing concluded, “We have an amazing treatment gap in this country…[in which]…over two million people [in the U.S.] who could benefit from treatment…aren’t getting any.”
COMMUNITY AND CLERGY LEADERS URGE FOR REFORM
The four community leaders who spoke on the panel echoed Massing’s call for a treatment-based approach to the drug problem. The Reverend Calvin O. Butts, Pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, described a popular attitude among poor urban communities, those most affected by the Rockefeller Drug laws, which he argued led to the communities’ initial acceptance of the tough legislation. Distressed by the high incidence of drug-related violence in their communities, people in Harlem and elsewhere cried “to lock [the perpetrators] up and throw away the key,” Butts explained. Lacking a better solution and wanting to appease these communities, “politicians jumped on the bandwagon,” argued Butts.
Poverty became the centerpiece of Butts’s speech and of the speeches that followed from Bishop James F. McCarthy of the Archdiocese of New York, former prisoner Elaine Bartlett, youth activist Tasha Williams, Assemblymember Jeffrion Aubry, and policy analysts Ron Daniels and Robert Gangi Executive Directors of the Center for Constitutional Rights and the Correctional Association of New York, respectively.
Bartlett was the evening’s most provocative speaker and received a standing ovation. Her main point was that a purely punitive system without treatment, education, and family support programs do more harm than good in solving the drug problem. “When you lock a person up for 16 years, you lock up [their family as well]…The punishment does not fit the crime…[The first-time offenders] are not the ones who are bringing drugs into the community.” Bartlett said that she was treated “like an animal” while imprisoned for delivering four ounces of cocaine, her first offence. She described her children as having felt “abandoned” and told of her difficulty reintegrating into society. “I had to go on 52 interviews before I could get a job,” Bartlett said after explaining that she only received an education equivalent to an “8th grade reading level” while in prison.
THE DILEMMA OF A PRISON ECONOMY AND “INSTITUIONALIZED RACISM”
Bartlett’s speech provided a backdrop to Gangi’s and Daniels’s call to action. Speaking passionately about the need for the development of a more effective social service infrastructure for underserved urban populations, Daniels implored the audience to understand “the struggle to reform the Rockefeller Drug Laws” as “part of a bigger change”.
Daniels passed the torch to his policy analyst cohort, Gangi, who argued that, “the ‘war on drugs’ is not a war by middle class people of any color against white middle class drug users and sellers; it is a war against poor communities of color.” Gangi cited the statistic that 94 percent of drug users and sellers are white, but that 85 percent of New York’s prisoners are black and Latino. The Correctional Association of New York estimates the total number of drug offenders in New York state prisons at 22,300.
“Prisons function as a source of economic development for upstate white communities…a community the size of Ithaca [has been] relocated [from downstate New York] to upstate white communities,” said Gangi. He argued that the effects of current drug policy constitute the “institutionalized subjugation of one race by another” and that drug policy reform “would take the first important steps in reversing a policy of…racism undertaken by our government.”
Gangi and Bartlett made note of the related problems and effects of census-taking in New York state, in which upstate prisoners are counted as residents of their prison’s location, dislocating funds that would otherwise have gone to their home communities. Critical of the state’s financial investments in prisons in lieu of treatment programs and on the upstate economy’s reliance on the industry created by prison development, Bartlett asked in desperation, “What about us?”
PROSPECTS FOR REFORM
Jeffrion Aubry, Democratic Assemblymember from the 35th district in Harlem and chair of the Committee on Corrections, spoke in vague terms about the possibilities for reform. He and the other panelists emphasized a restoration of judicial discretion in sentencing and treatment options, a general reduction in sentencing, the enhancement of a treatment program, the implementation of a life skills program for prisoners, and the redistribution of funds presently allocated for prisons towards abuse prevention and treatment programs both inside and outside prisons. They are up against strong opposition from many district attorneys who see a decrease in their discretionary powers on the horizon and an enduring fear on the part of Democratic legislators (the most obvious proponents of reform) of appearing “soft on crime” and losing the confidence of their electorates.
Aubry maintained that all proposals for reforms to date were insufficient and that the likelihood of the introduction of overly lenient reforms was slim. “If there were any policy changes too lenient, I would have put them out there because I am probably the most lenient around,” said Aubry in an interview after the panel. When asked about the prospects for introducing reforms that will address the current deficiencies in the law and attend to the broader issues of urban poverty stressed by the other panelists, Aubry responded with some hesitation, “We don’t have a groundswell to deal with [poverty]...”
CAN THE “WAR ON DRUGS” GIVE WAY TO A PEACEFUL POLICY?
New Yorkers and others anticipating nation-wide reform (California voters demanded treatment instead of prison for nonviolent offenders last year) wait for the groundswell to occur and have events planned including an upcoming lobby day and education forum in Albany to speed up the process. The battle over an effective and just drug policy has begun and “Drop the Rock” campaigners are poised in all their uniforms – as policy wonks, clergy, grassroots organizers, attorneys and judges, and survivors of the system – to advance into new territory, hoping their opponents see sense in a swift surrender.