Drop The Rock (2002)

New York’s Rockefeller drug laws, enacted in 1973, are recognized nationally as a model of injustice. The harsh mandatory minimum sentencing requirements are inefficient, wasteful, and inherently unfair. This sentencing scheme has eliminated judges from their constitutional role as objective arbiters, and has led to the forced incarceration of tens of thousands of non-violent drug offenders. The laws are applied unequally, and they fail to meet the fundamental objectives of criminal statutes – that is, to deter crime and enhance the public safety.

• The Rockefeller drug laws are a failure, both as a matter of law and public policy
  In 1994 New York’s highest court heard the appeal of a 17-year-old girl given a sentence of 15 years to life for the sale of drugs. A majority on the court felt compelled to uphold the mandatory sentence. Judge Bellacosa, dissenting, found the sentence so cruel as to “shock the conscience.”

  The majority observed, however, that it had no disagreement with Judge Bellacosa or with the majority of Appellate Division judges who believe that the “harsh mandatory treatment of drug offenders . . . has failed to deter drug trafficking or to control the epidemic of drug abuse in this country, and has resulted in the incarceration of many offenders whose crimes arose out of their own addiction and for whom the cost of imprisonment would have been better spent on treatment and rehabilitation.” People v. Thompson, 83 N.Y.2d 477, 611 N.Y.S.2d 470 (1994).

• The Rockefeller drug laws do not enhance the public safety
  Most drug offenders are not violent. New York prisons are crowded with non-violent offenders who have been sentenced for possessing small amounts of drugs. According to Human Rights Watch, nearly 60% of drug offenders incarcerated in New York prisons in 1999 had been convicted of low-level felonies – which involve only minute amounts of drugs. In 2000, more than 44% of all persons in New York prisons were there for drug offenses; the vast majority of these persons had been charged with low-level offenses and had no history of violence.

• The Rockefeller drug laws are enforced with a severe discriminatory bias against African-Americans and Latinos
  Government studies show that the majority of drug users and sellers are white; and yet, nationally 94 percent of drug offenders in state prisons, including New York prisons, are African-American or Latino. Why? Police ignore the sale and use of drugs in upper-middle class communities, where such activity occurs largely behind closed doors.

  A senior officer with the Chicago Police Department’s Narcotics Division put it this way in a 1990 interview: “There is as much cocaine in the Stock Exchange as there is in the black community. But those guys are harder to catch. . . . [T]he guy standing on the corner, he’s almost got a sign on his back. These guys are just arrestable.” (“Blacks Feel Brunt of War,” Los Angeles Times, April 22, 1990)

• Treatment and counseling of drug offenders will enhance the public safety
  Studies conducted in Arizona, California, Connecticut, Ohio and New York have reached a consistent finding regarding crime and drugs: criminal activity related to drugs is substantially reduced by effective treatment. The RAND Institute’s Drug Policy Research Center reported in a 1997 study that treatment is 15 times more effective in reducing crime than is the imposition of mandatory minimum prison sentences.

• New York State is wasting hundreds of millions of dollars by investing in incarceration on a massive scale, rather than in treatment and prevention
  The New York State Division of Budget noted in a report issued in 2000 that the annual operating budget for New York State prisons has increased from approximately $450 million in fiscal year 1982-1983 to more than $2 billion today.

  New York taxpayers presently pay approximately $32,000 per inmate annually. By comparison, residential drug treatment costs between $17,000 and $21,000 thousand per client, annually. Outpatient drug-treatment care is approximately $2,700-$4,500 per person, annually. (Treatment costs reported by the Correctional Association of New York.)

• There is now deep and broad support for repeal of the Rockefeller drug laws, and for shifting drug policy toward alternatives to incarceration
  The Catholic Bishops of New York, the League of Women Voters, as well as 80 percent of 109 candidates for the New York legislature who were polled during the 2000 election have called for restoring judicial discretion in the sentencing of drug offenders, and for greatly expanded use of treatment alternatives to incarceration. More than 200 organizations in the Drop the Rock coalition support repeal of the Rockefeller drug laws.

Printer-friendly Version