War On Drugs
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The Beginning of the End of the Marijuana Ban
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A Vote for Legal Marijuana
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An Exit Strategy from the Drug War
Criminal Justice Commission Gets a Leg Up
Published January 22, 2010 @ 10:45AM PT
A bipartisan bill that would form a commission to evaluate the U.S. criminal justice system took a step forward yesterday, passing the Senate Judiciary Committee by a voice vote. A note to newly elected Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown: please don't kill this on top of healthcare, too.
Sponsored by Virginia Sen. Jim Webb (left), the bill raises the hope that the federal government might finally put the brakes on the tough-on-crime prison explosion that's wasted millions of lives and billions of dollars over the past four decades. Groups from Families Against Mandatory Minimums to the Sentencing Project immediately praised the committee's passage of the bill. Yet even among criminal justice reformers, not everybody's on board.
Sane Sentencing in School Zones
Published January 14, 2010 @ 06:57AM PT
With a week left in office, outgoing New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine is leaving behind a string of smart criminal justice reforms. Late, I suppose, is better than never.
Corzine signed a bill on Tuesday that gives discretion back to judges in drug cases for people convicted of certain drug crimes in school zones. It's a sweeping change, and one that was a long time coming. Now if other states could only follow Jersey's lead.
Sentencing discretion is important in all types of cases, but it's especially critical in these school-zone offenses, where studies have shown that broad-brush mandatory minimums completely fail to make schools safer or to prevent kids from buying drugs. The previous law included mandatory sentences of at least a year for marijuana offenses and three years for other drugs. With discretion, a judge can avoid a long sentence for a person caught with a small amount of a drug who happens to be 999 feet from a school. In many urban areas, as the great work of the Prison Policy Initiative has shown, almost everything is within 1,000 feet of a school.
Meanwhile, a judge can still choose to hand down a harsh sentence when evidence shows that a drug dealer was actually targeting middle schoolers as his customers. That kind of activity needs to be prevented, but we don't need mandatory minimums to stop it. In fact, they don't work.
The War on Drugs is a War on People
Published January 13, 2010 @ 06:42AM PT
Ethan Nadelmann is part of Change.org's Changemakers network, comprised of leading voices for social change. Change.org asked Mr Nadelmann to respond to questions to provide context for his work and the causes he supports.
Change.org: What cause or causes would you most like to promote as a Changemaker and why?
Nothing matters to me more than ending the war on drugs and reducing our extraordinary overreliance on the criminal justice system. I want to make marijuana legal, decriminalize all drugs for personal use, and shift our drug policies to a health-based approach.
The U.S. has less than 5 percent of the world's population, but almost 25 percent of the world's prisoners, ranking first in the per capita incarceration of our fellow citizens. We have increased the number of people behind bars from roughly 500,000 people in 1980 to 2.3 million today – and altogether we now have over 7 million people under criminal justice supervision.
The drug war – the dominant role of the criminal justice system in dealing with certain drugs and the people who buy, sell, make, and use them – is driving this explosive increase in incarceration more than anything else. The U.S. arrests almost a million people for marijuana each year and over a half million people are behind bars tonight for a drug law violation.
The movement for drug policy reform stands in the footsteps of other movements for individual freedom and social justice – it currently stands where the gay rights movement stood in the 1970s, or where the civil rights movement stood in the 1950s, or where the women's rights movement stood in the early part of the 20th century.
A New Year for Second Chances
Published December 31, 2009 @ 06:36AM PT
As 2009 draws to a close, we can look back over a decade of good and bad for American the criminal justice system and our prison policy. But one thing is clear: we're at a moment of great opportunity for reform.
There is more awareness among the American public now than ever before about our failed years of criminal justice policy and the lives and money we've wasted on the drug war, the death penalty and the explosion of the prison state. The system could see change real change in 2010, and a good start would be a stronger Second Chance Act.
NYC's Racially Skewed Pot Arrests
Published December 27, 2009 @ 01:52PM PT
Marijuana arrests have spiked in New York City under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, according to new research from a Queens College professor, and the people arrested for pot are almost exclusively minorities.
Bloomberg, who once told New York magazine that he smoked pot "and enjoyed it," has quietly continued the 'broken-windows' practices of former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and has seriously stepped up marijuana arrests. In 2008 alone, more than 40,000 people were arrested in New York for low-level marijuana offenses -- and 87 percent of them were black of Latino. When you consider that white people are more likely to use pot than African Americans, the problem here becomes even clearer.
New York Times columnist Jim Dwyer wrote about these numbers this week, drawing from the research of Queens College sociology professor Harry Levine. Dwyer finds that the city explains the discrepancy away through a reliance on the broken windows theory, which is alive and well in NYC.
“Marijuana arrests — which rarely lead to jail — are concentrated in neighborhoods with the highest concentrations of violent crime because that’s where the police focus their attention in order to reduce victimization,” Bloomberg's criminal justice aide John Feinblatt told Dwyer.
Why America is to Blame for Mexico’s Drug War
Published December 11, 2009 @ 03:50PM PT
I attended a debate recently in New York on the role of the U.S. in Mexico’s drug war -- and I was happy to see most of the audience on my side. The U.S. is finally waking up to the destruction our drug war has caused outside of our borders, and we’re moving in the direction of a series of policy shifts that will transform our domestic drug problems and change the way we interact with the countries that supply our insatiable demand for drugs.
The proposition of the debate -- part of the Intelligence Squared series that runs on Bloomberg TV and NPR -- was: “America is to Blame for Mexico’s Drug War.” Listen to the full debate here. Allow me to explain why I voted yes.
Cutting the Cord on Failing Anti-Drug Ads
Published December 10, 2009 @ 07:03AM PT
Congress will cut the drug czar's anti-drug advertising budget by more than a third next year, continuing a decline for the ads, which have been proven ineffective by repeated studies.
House and Senate negotiators reached agreement on a 2010 Appropriations bill yesterday, and the bill includes $45 million for the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign, a reduction of $25 million from last year (and less than half of what we were spending in 2006).
Several studies have found problems with the anti-drug advertising campaigns, but the best known finding is an extensive report commissioned by the Government Accountability Office in 2006. The report found that not only did government anti-drug ads fail to have an impact on drug use, they actually made use seem more common and normal -- perhaps leading more kids to try drugs. The full report is available here.
