We have mostly enforced the tough on crime laws in the cities where politically, the people’s clout is minimal. Last week, I opened Part I by posing seven questions for the reader to ponder. The answer to each is found by sorting through the devastation that our criminal justice system has caused our cities to suffer in the last 40+ years, particularly the mounting casualties suffered by city residents as a result of the war on drugs. It’s much easier to pass tough laws and institute programs that impact minorities in our cities than if the legislative or executive branches did so in our suburbs. And it’s an endless cycle. The more we incarcerate the more the crime rate increases so that the general public clamors for tougher laws in the cities to deal with the burgeoning crime problem which is caused, at least to some degree by this tough on crime philosophy.
Of what do I speak? Examples range from mandatory minimum sentences for any drug transaction within 1,000 feet of a school to increasing violence by telling defendants who are arrested that the best way to have the mandatory minimum sentence dropped is by being a police informant to rat out others who use or possess drugs - friends, family, neighbors-anyone will do.
Snitches get stitches
He’s told that if his cooperation leads to many more arrests, that “accomplishment” will be taken into consideration by the prosecutor to get his sentence reduced. Sadly the criminal justice system is increasingly familiar with this threat (and promise). There is so much retaliation for cooperation with the police that there are plenty of eyewitnesses that fail to testify because of the harm that could be inflicted on them and their families.
The problem with mandatory minimum sentences for defendants within a thousand feet of a school zone is that city school zones are nearly always within 1,000 feet of the drug arrest, resulting in almost every city resident being subject to this tougher sentence. Whereas, almost the opposite is the case in the suburbs and in the country where of course a much higher rate of white people reside and where nearly every drug transaction is not within 1,000 feet of a school. So where is drug enforcement the greatest? Are “tough” drug laws effective? Is it logical? Has it worked?
Now, this “tough on drugs” law might at least appear to be a reasonable response to the drug problem if the facts were to tell us that. But they don’t. First of all we have arrested more people, seized more illegal drugs, destroyed the family structure and at the same time created a greater chance of violent retaliation for all the many drug informants. There should be no drug problem today. We should have won the war on drugs, but despite increasing law enforcement in the cities, the drug problem hasn’t gotten better; it’s gotten worse. Furthermore, I’ve never had one school zone mandatory minimum sentence that actually involved a student, teacher or staff that was conducted on school property including school kids going to and from school.
I’m not saying drug deals don’t happen in school, however, we in Berks County have never once had a drug case within 1,000 feet of a school that had anything at all to even remotely do with a school property or school activities. In fact, most of the cases that get to court involve transactions that occur when school is not in session. Most are in the evening and middle of the night during the summer and on weekends in locations that may be as far as four blocks from a school, but still within 1,000 feet.
Crack cocaine v. powder
Crack cocaine is a drug of preference for minorities while powdered cocaine is mostly used by white people in the suburbs. For 25 years federal mandatory minimum sentences punished crack cocaine sales 100 times more than powder! In other words, possession with intent to deliver five grams of crack received the same mandatory minimum sentence as powder but only if the weight of the powder is 100 times greater, 500 grams. That discrepancy was criticized for many years because it discriminated against minorities – so they changed it. However, Congress did not make them equal in punishment for the same weight. It was reduced to 10 to 1. It’s still discriminatory but not as unfair an inequity as before – but still an inequity.
Stop and Frisk
In addition, some of the “enforcement” of drug laws come from police officers stopping minorities, asking for identification and ultimately permission to search them. These are not cases where the officer has any probable cause to believe any crime has or will occur or to reasonably suspect the citizen even possesses contraband or the fruits of any crime. There are hundreds of thousands of stop and frisk practices that occur in every major city in the United States every year! Philadelphia and New York, among others have faced civil litigation because 85-90% of all stops are of minorities. They don’t conduct stop and frisk in the suburbs or in the countryside, where more than 85-90% of people are white.
Conclusion
The war on drugs has failed. The drug problem’s worse than ever and also includes increased violence in our country and in other countries that fight this war. In the last decade, Mexico has cracked down on their drug problem. What is the result? The drug problem has grown worse and the murder rate has gone through the roof. There have been more than 50,000 violent deaths in Mexico in the last 10 years, most in retaliation and range from victims who are a member of a different drug cartel, to elected officials who enforce the laws to those who provide evidence to the government in an attempt to help their own case.
Locally our prisons are bursting at the seams with drug offenders, most of which are small fish in the drug enterprise. If they were big fish, we would have greater results from the war on drugs. That’s logical. A few examples of the extremely large seizures throughout history in the U.S. and in other countries, and one must ask is the drug problem corrected? Is it even better today?: France 2013 – 1.4 tons of cocaine in 31 unclaimed suitcases in luggage on a flight from Caracus. During 1984 in Columbia, $1.2 billion worth of cocaine, which is 14 tons, was seized after a raid on a jungle lab controlled by Pablo Escobar. In 1989, a Los Angeles warehouse stored 21.4 tons or the equivalent of 1.38 billion powder doses of the drug. If not seized, it had a street value in Los Angeles of more than $6 billion. Drug agents also seized 13.8 tons of cocaine in Columbia in 2005 and the U.S. Coast Guard found 20 tons of powder on a Panamanian ship.
The annual budget for the PA Department of Corrections alone has increased 1900% from 1980 ($94 million) to today, as it is about to exceed $2 billion annually. And this does not include 50 prisons, and numerous halfway houses and federal prisons throughout Pennsylvania. What have they accomplished?
The family structure in our cities has deteriorated from the over incarceration of parents. We know that a higher percentage of minorities are living in our cities and that an inordinately higher percentage of the minority population is put in prison so far from home that family contact is impossible. (See footnote 2)
What can we do? Contact your legislator and request that we attack this problem from all aspects, not just by putting tougher crimes on the books and beefing up the city law enforcement presence as we’ve done over and over again in the past four decades.
[1] This is the conclusion of the Pennsylvania Commission on Sentencing from its study conducted about four years ago, yet school zone mandatories continue in full force and effect in Pennsylvania.
[2]My wife recently retired as an elementary school counselor in the Reading School District. She and our grown daughter still make school visits to the kids as they progress through the grades. They decided to invite them to a lunch at our home over the holidays. One child couldn’t join them. Her mother was incarcerated, so the “separated” father seized the opportunity to stop paying child support by bringing her to live with him, thus cutting all contact the child had with her grandmother, who had raised the family, since mom went away. The grandmother told my wife she can’t invite the child to lunch because the father won’t answer her phone calls. She does know that dad is living with a 20-year-old mother of two. The young mother treats the child as an outcast, giving all her love and attention to her own children. The grandmother has hired an attorney to obtain custody of the child again. The mother? She is incarcerated at the opposite end of the state, an 8-hour drive to the state prison in Erie, Pennsylvania.
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