The Supreme Court heard arguments this week about one of the greatest controversies in American criminal law: the differing treatment of crack and powder cocaine, reports the New York Times. Said Justice Sonia Sotomayor, "I don’t know that there’s one law that has created more controversy or more discussion about its racial impact than this one.” Crack and powder cocaine are two forms of the same drug. But, until recently, a drug dealer selling crack cocaine was subject to the same sentence as one selling 100 times as much powder.
In 2010, Congress enacted a law that reduced the disparity but only slightly. The question on Tuesday was whether the new, lesser punishments also applied to people who committed crimes before the law became effective but were not sentenced until afterward. The usual rule, set out in an 1871 law, is that new laws do not apply retroactively unless Congress expressly says so. Here Congress said nothing, or at least nothing in so many words. It did instruct the United States Sentencing Commission to act quickly to revise its discretionary sentencing guidelines to reflect the new ratios. Several justices suggested that the 1871 law might pose an insurmountable barrier to defendants who sold cocaine before August 2010.
Read full entry »The White House ruled out legalizing drugs, instead announcing this week it would seek a “middle ground” focusing on treatment rather than throwing drug abusers in jail, notes the Columbus Dispatch. “This is nothing short of a revolution in how we approach drug control,” said Gil Kerlikowske, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.
He said the new strategy would be guided by the principle that addiction is a treatable disease, that those addicted to drugs can recover and that innovative criminal-justice reforms can stop the revolving door of drug use, crime, imprisonment and eventual and inevitable rearrest. “We are not going to arrest our way out of this problem,” he said. The new strategy included an emphasis on educating the public about the dangers of prescription-drug abuse and the need to clean out medicine cabinets, plus a push for law enforcement to crack down on so-called pill mills.
Read full entry »
By Erik Roskes
Blogger Erik Roskes asks, 'Is incarceration addiction is tantamount to eugenics without surgery?'
Read full entry »
By Julie Stewart
Politicians on both sides of the aisle are talking over-criminalization--but they must overcome serious roadblocks, says Julie Stewart of Families Against Mandatory Minimums.
Read full entry »Calling addiction a treatable disease, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie says he would require treatment for nonviolent criminals with drug dependence...
Read full entry »When Mark Geralds of Sikeston, Mo., got a federal prison sentence of nearly 30 years for a crack cocaine offense in 1996, says St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Bill McClellan, "this kind of draconian sentence was so common that his sentencing did not make the newspaper." When many federal crack penalties were cut retroactively last year, St. Louis federal probation officers Lisa White and Clark Porter set up a crash course for new releasees like Geralds, who weren't going to halfway houses but were to be released outright because they had done their time.
Many had been locked up for years. Few had much education. Many had little or no experience in the working world. Many had histories of drug abuse. White and Porter met twice a week with 17 releasees to discuss how to make it on the outside, how to find work, what resources were available. They had a graduation ceremony Thursday at the federal courthouse. White and Porter talked about how impressed they had been with the releasees' determination.
Read full entry »Orreco Lyons received an early Christmas present last month when a federal judge in Tennessee reduced his crack-cocaine trafficking sentence from 71/2 years to just over six years, says the Memphis Commercial Appeal. Lyons, 31, is one of thousands of federal prisoners who are benefiting from a retroactive change in federal sentencing laws that aims to narrow the disparity of punishments for crack-cocaine offenders versus those sentenced for powder cocaine.
Reductions, which can range from a few months to a few years, depend on a number of factors, such as whether an inmate has a prior criminal record, whether other crimes also were committed and whether a weapon was involved. Federal Public Defender Steve Shankman of Memphis is reviewing more than 200 cases. He believes that up to 80 percent "will receive some relief." With the retroactive change going into effect last Nov. 1, 1,480 inmates were immediately released and 2,256 others had sentence reductions but still had time to serve before being released, said Ed Ross, spokesman for the U.S. Bureau of Prisons.
Read full entry »Convicted former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich wants to enroll in a substance-abuse program at a federal prison outside of Denver, a move that could shave up to a year off of his prison sentence, reports the Chicago Tribune. The move raises questions about whether Blagojevich suffers from a real substance-abuse problem or is simply angling to reduce his stiff 14-year sentence. Former associates of convicted former Illinois Gov. George Ryan said it didn’t take much to get into the Residential Drug Abuse Treatment Program — as little as regularly consuming five alcoholic drinks a week before they had been incarcerated.
“Any defense lawyer in town that’s worth their salt all know about this and they all try to get their clients in,” said Scott Fawell, Ryan’s former chief of staff who cut his sentence by 8 months by completing the drug program at a federal prison in Yankton, S.D. “(A lot) of the people who go through the system now ask for it or attempt to get in. How many actually need it, I couldn’t tell you.” U.S. District Judge James Zagel agreed to recommend Blagojevich for the counseling program at a low-security prison in Littleton, Co., but the ultimate decision will be made by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons. Under federal guidelines, inmates must have “a verifiable substance-use disorder.” Federal prisons spokesman Chris Burke said, “We look for evidence that the inmate has a documented substance-abuse history before their arrest. If that is five drinks a week and there is something to verify that beyond that inmate’s statement, that might qualify.”
An analysis of 32 drug courts by the U.S. Government Accountability Office showed that program participants were generally less likely to be re-arrested than comparison group members drawn from criminal court. Differences were statistically significant for 18 of the programs.
Cost-benefit analyses showed mixed results. The percentages of drug-court program participants re-arrested were lower than for comparison group members by 6 to 26 percentage points. Drug court participants who completed their program had re-arrest rates 12 to 58 percentage points below those of the comparison group. Analysis of relapse data for eight programs showed that drug-court program participants were less likely than comparison group members to use drugs, based on drug tests or self-reported drug use, although the difference was not always significant. Among studies assessing drug-court costs and benefits, the net benefit ranged from positive $47,852 to negative $7,108 per participant. The Justice Department agreed with a GAO recommendation that Justice document key methods used to guide future revisions of its performance measures for the drug-court program.
Read full entry »By Steve Yoder
Many of the leading Republican contenders in the presidential race have pushed reformist 'smart on crime' agendas. But will those agendas survive if one of them sits in the White House?
Read full entry »The Minneapolis Star Tribune takes a look at how the change in federal crack cocaine sentencing rules is playing out in its local area. Nationwide, more than 500 inmates were released on Tuesday. In Minnesota, the change in the guidelines will mean an early release for 100 to 150 inmates who were convicted of crack cocaine crimes. The change is eventually expected to benefit 12,000 U.S. inmates, reducing sentences by an average of three years.
For the past few months, U.S. probation officers, federal defenders, and federal prosecutors in Minnesota have been combing through hundreds of court files in an effort to find inmates who may be eligible for release under the new retroactive sentencing rules. The current revision can result in reductions ranging from zero to even six levels of severity. One person with a projected 2015 release date will be eligible for immediate release. Chief U.S. Probation Officer Kevin Lowry said some inmates who were released early after the first guidelines change experienced "a little bit of culture shock" at their sudden release. "Some did indicate that they had anxiety about being back in the community sooner than they expected," he said. Probation officers are working to connect the outgoing offenders with social services to ensure they have a place to stay, as well as educational and employment opportunities.
Read full entry »Darryl Flood thought he would have to wait until 2013 to get out of prison, more than a decade after he pleaded guilty in a federal cocaine case. Now, says...
Read full entry »Nearly 40 years after tough new drug laws led to an explosion in prison populations, New York state has dramatically reversed course, chalking up a 62 percent drop in people serving time for drug crimes today compared with 2000, reports the Poughkeepsie Journal. The steep decline — driven, experts said, by shifting attitudes toward drug offenders and the dropping crime rate — means that nearly 16,000 fewer minorities serve state time today than in 2000, groups that were hardest hit by the so-called war on drugs. Overall, the prison population declined 22 percent.
Advocates called the statistics "quite extraordinary" and "encouraging." When compared nationwide, New York's figures are especially stunning. Among the 50 states, New York charted the biggest drop in its prison rolls from 2000 to 2010, a decade when 37 state prison systems had double-digit population hikes. It was the state's 1973 drug laws, championed by then-Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, that helped kick off a massive national prison buildup — and the highest incarceration rate in the industrialized world.
Read full entry »Some federal inmates who can win earlier-than-usual releases as the U.S. Sentencing Commission eases crack-cocaine penalties can benefit from the growth of prisoner re-entry programs, criminologist Beth Huebner of the University of Missouri-St. Louis tells the St. Louis Beacon. "Most of them didn't have a violent history," she says. "Most of them need services that we can provide better in the community. It's difficult to provide treatment services in prison because it's not a therapeutic environment. In the community, where people have support from their family, when they have a job and people around them that are helping, they do much better in treatment."
Federal parole officer Mike Nicholson agrees, to some extent. "A lot of them do want to change. Being in prison has taught a lot of them the structure that they never had." On the other hand, Nicholson says some former inmates tell him "prison teaches them to be better crooks and slicker, especially those who don't want to change." Some 196 inmates from St. Louis are among the 12,000 nationally who could benefit from the plan to make changes in crack-sentencing rules retroactive.
Read full entry »Eric Brewer of Pittsburgh pleaded guilty in a crack cocaine case dating from 2009. When he was sentenced last week, he got a five-year prison term under a defunct federal law, says the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Last year's law eliminated the 5-year mandatory term for cases like Brewer's but the law was not declared retroactive.
Brewer's crime occurred in West Virginia, where a judge invoked the old law, but Brian Kornbrath, a federal public defender in West Virginia, says dozens of other federal judges are basing their current sentences the new law. Last fall, federal judge D. Brock Hornby of Maine said the new law should apply to any defendant not yet sentenced, saying, "understandably, Congress might not have wanted a large volume of previously sentenced offenders to be released from prison immediately, but what possible reason could there be to want judges to continue to impose new sentences that are not 'fair' over the next five years while the statute of limitations runs?" Kornbrath hopes the Supreme Court will address the issue.
