February/March 2005
Board Makes Repeal of Drug Laws a Chapter Priority
Interview with Prison Reform Expert,
Robert Gangi, Director of the Correctional Association of NY
Robert Gangi
At
its December 1, 2004 meeting the Board of Directors of the National Association
of Social
Workers New York City Chapter engaged in discussion about the Rockefeller
Drug Laws and their disproportionately negative impact on low income communities,
and communities comprised of people of color in New York City. The Board
voted to support activities to repeal the drug laws. Coincidentally, a
week later, the legislature passed a bill and the Governor signed into
law a few changes to those drug laws.
The NASW-NYC Board included in its decision to join forces with organizations
that have devoted many years to changing the Rockefeller Drug Laws. The
Correctional Association of New York, founded in 1844, was the primary
advocacy group that the board chose to align with. An interview was held
on January 7th with its executive director, Bob Gangi, to clarify key
issues. Excerpts from that interview are presented here.
Many believe that actions that remove “drug
criminals” from the streets are good for communities. How do you
address this perspective?
In our judgment, there is not necessarily a dichotomy between what some people consider to be a law enforcement approach and our point that mandatory sentencing laws like the Rockefeller Drug Laws (RDLs) are ineffective, unjust, wasteful, and racially biased.
We think that there is a role for law enforcement. Our judgment is that
the response should be more multi-faceted and nuanced, including law enforcement,
particularly in communities where drug related crime is rampant. Law enforcement
is required to break up gangs, to get the violence prone people out of
hallways and off of street corners where they’re doing bad things.
What we’re also saying is there needs to be a more thoughtful and
more comprehensive community based response that includes drug treatment,
because people involved in drug related crimes are often active users.
All the research shows that treatment is more effective than prison in
diverting people from a criminal lifestyle. It’s not that it’s
cheaper, but it’s more successful in reducing recidivism. When people
come out of treatment programs, they’re less likely to commit crimes
than when they come out of prison. When I meet with groups who are skeptical
about my claim, I say, ‘would you rather run into a drug offender
late at night in the subway when they’ve done three years at Attica
or eight months in a residential treatment program?’
One of the great failures of public policy in the U.S. in the last thirty
years is that we don’t have an urban policy; and this was not discussed
during the last presidential campaign. There’s a critical problem
which is that the inner cities, where poor people of color frequently
live, are plagued by a whole range of problems, including failing schools,
lousy housing, little economic opportunity, families in various ranges
of dysfunctional states; and there’s no policy, no coordinated comprehensive
policy for addressing it.
In a way, the criminal justice system has been brought in to fill the
breach. It doesn’t work. Its enormously expensive, it’s racist,
it’s harsh, and in spite of the efforts of some of the good people
who work in the system, it’s essentially ineffective. It grounds
up the people caught up in the system. So the cycle that we’re talking
about, of violence and dysfunction, drug addiction, and these are very
serious matters, are not addressed. The cycle is not broken. Too often,
imprisonment reinforces the cycle because they can be violent places.
How do you account for the Rockefeller Drug Laws leading to racial
inequities?
The people who get arrested, indicted and sent to prison are poor people of color. Ninety three percent of drug offenders in NYS prisons are people of color. It’s an extraordinary figure when the majority of people who use drugs are white. There’s research that indicates the majority of people who sell drugs are white.
The main criterion for guilt under the drug laws is not your role in the
transaction, but the amount of drugs you have in your possession when
you’re arrested. What it does, in effect, is provide an incentive
for the cops and the prosecutors to concentrate on such measures as ‘buy
and bust’ operations, and drug sweeps, because you can pick up a
lot of people who are carrying relatively small amounts of drugs, and,
on the basis of that alone, you can indict them. You don’t have
to spend the time and resources to build an evidentiary case that someone
was involved in a drug trade. All you have to do is catch them with a
couple of vials of crack on them.
When the RDLs were passed, the major profiteers understood that the way
to avoid being punished under the laws, the way to avoid the sanctions
of those laws, was to not carry drugs. So the arrangements were made for
other people to carry drugs, and those are the people who get caught,
literally, holding the bag. The major profiteers, for the most part, do
not get sent to prison under the RDLs. You’ll hear the long-timers
in prison say, “I’ve never met a king-pin in prison”.
In many ways, the criminal justice system is a war on poor communities
of color. This is the racist aspect of the system and it is shocking;
it’s undeniable. If you have a figure of 93% of the drug offenders
locked up being people of color, there’s no way you can say it doesn’t
reflect a biased, racist approach. How can you explain those numbers?
If you go into the City Court pens, all you see are black and brown faces.
Sometimes, literally, you won’t see one white face among hundreds
of people who’ve been arrested in one particular day.
It’s not that the people we’re seeing haven’t done something,
although sometimes literally it’s jumping a turnstile, sleeping
on a park bench, drinking a beer on your front stoop. It’s not that
the people locked up haven’t violated some law or some aspect of
the social order, although sometimes minor, it’s that the response
is excessive, it’s heavy–handed, it’s in many cases
inappropriate, and what it does, more than almost anything, is contribute
to the debilitation of the individuals who get caught up into it…and
sometimes their communities.
That’s in a way what we’re fighting when we urge the repeal
of the RDLs. We’re promoting what we think is a more discriminating,
not discriminatory, approach to this very real problem of drug-related
crime.
The Legislature just passed reforms to the Rockefeller Drug Law.
To what extent does that reform reduce the inequities of the law?
It reduces the inequities to a certain degree in that it reduces the prison sentence, but fundamental inequities remain. The change reduced the harshest provision from 15 years to life to 8 to 20 years, and it doubled the weights for possession.
When the laws were initially passed in 1973, the sale of one ounce and
possession of two ounces, if you were convicted of that offense, required
the judge to give you a sentence of 15 to life. That was the minimum.
The judge could give you up to 25 to life. In 1979, they doubled the weights,
so that it was sale of two ounces, possession of four ounces, that triggered
the “15 to life” sentence. Now they’ve doubled the possession
piece so it’s still sale of two ounces, possession of eight ounces,
that will trigger the “8 to 20”.
The change is for a relatively small group – “A-1” offenders.
There are 16,000 drug offenders in state prisons today, and only 446 are
“A-1”s.
The main problem is that the laws are still mandatory, so the judges still
don’t have the discretion to send someone to non-incarcerative punishment.
The main criterion for guilt is still in place: the weight of the drugs
in your possession, not your role in the transaction. So, again, the incentive,
the weight of how the system operates, will fall on low-level drug offenders.
And there was no money provided for treatment.
In our judgment, there will be fewer people in prison for drug offenses,
and that’s a good thing. There are people with excessive sentences
who will receive reduced sentences; they’ll get out of prison earlier,
and that’s good. But the basic structure for the way law enforcement
and the courts prosecute and adjudicate drug cases is still in place.
You still have thousands of low level drug offenders, mainly poor people
of color, sent to prison for relatively long periods of time. And that’s
why we said that the RDLs are still on the books and fundamental changes
still have to be made before there’s a just and balanced –
a better, and less racist – system for prosecuting these cases.
Given the recent modification of the Rockefeller Drug Laws, what
are some effective trategies NASW-NYC and individual social workers could
pursue in addressing the repeal of the Rockefeller Drug Law?
It’s hard to read the political land scape at the moment. Nobody’s staked out their ground yet. The Governor did not mention this issue in his “State of the State” speech. We don’t know what he’s going to be up to regarding this issue. He did have the gumption to announce when he signed the bill last month, that “this is the end of the Rockefeller Drug Laws”. This is a patent misrepresentation; the RDLs are still on the books. Mandatory sentencing still applies to all low level drug offenders. The basic problems still remain.
When the bill was passed, the Assembly leadership and Joe Bruno, who is
the State Senate leader, said, “more has to be done”. The
reform movement is still intent on keeping the pressure on. The tough
question is how do we most effectively do that?