NYCLU: Historic Reforms of New York’s Draconian Drug Sentencing Scheme Imminent

“New York State is on the verge of a historic moment,” said NYCLU Executive Director Donna Lieberman. “This bill does not eliminate the Rockefeller Drug Laws but it does provide for a new approach to substance abuse. Substance abuse is a public health issue and today, after 36 long years, New York is finally poised to treat it that way.”

Enacted in 1973, the Rockefeller Drug Laws mandate extremely harsh prison terms for the possession or sale of relatively small amounts of drugs. Though intended to target drug kingpins, most sentenced under the laws are convicted of low-level, nonviolent offenses. Most of the nearly 12,000 New Yorkers serving time for drug offenses have substance abuse problems; many others turned to drugs because of problems related to homelessness, mental illness or unemployment.

For decades, the NYCLU, criminal justice advocates and medical experts have fought to untie the hands of judges and allow addiction to be treated as a public health matter. As noted in the New York State Sentencing Commission’s recent report, sentencing non-violent drug offenders to prison is ineffective and counterproductive, and has resulted in unconscionable racial disparities: Blacks and Hispanics comprise more than 90 percent of those currently incarcerated for drug felonies, though most people using illegal drugs are white.

The budget bill embraces two fundamental principles of reform: elimination of mandatory minimum sentences, and a significant restoration of the ability for judges to order treatment and rehabilitation rather than incarceration.

“The proposed reform, if adopted, will not eliminate irrationality and injustice from the drug sentencing laws, but it shifts New York’s failed drug policy away from mass incarceration and toward a public health model,” said Robert Perry, NYCLU legislative director.

The bill:

• Restores the authority of a judge to send individuals charged with drug offenses into substance abuse treatment rather than prison;
• Expands in-prison treatment and re-entry services so that people who want and need help can access it; and
• Allows for approximately 1,500 people serving excessive sentences for low-level nonviolent drug offenses to apply for resentencing.

The NYCLU took pains, however, to make clear that while the bill represents an important step in overhauling the drug laws, it does not fully realize the reform principles on which the legislation is based. Significant remnants of the Rockefeller Drug Law scheme remain in place.

The NYCLU noted, for example, that the bill:

• Leaves in place a sentencing scheme that permits unreasonably harsh maximum sentences for low-level, non-violent drug offenses;
• Disqualifies from eligibility for treatment and rehabilitation individuals who may be most in need of such programs; and
• Retains a weight-based sentencing scheme, which will lead to a long mandatory prison sentence for someone who has a few grams more of a substance than someone who is eligible for treatment.

“To hear the protests of the district attorney’s lobby, one would think that the legislature is proposing radical reform,” Lieberman said. “It is not. The bill restores an important measure of common sense and rationality to our drug laws. But there is more work to be done to restore fundamental justice and fairness.”