60 Minutes aired a special investigation last night exposing drug war injustices, interviewing federal judges who have taken a stand against the insanity. The entire War on Drugs transcript is available online from CBS News. Here are some bits and pieces:
The population in federal prisons has quadrupled from 43,000 inmates in 1987 to 173,000 today - at a cost to taxpayers of $4 billion a year.
How did that happen? In the wake of the cocaine epidemic of the 1980s, Congress passed harsh sentencing guidelines and mandatory-minimum sentencing laws - requiring federal judges in most cases to impose long jail terms on anyone convicted of drug trafficking, no matter how small their crime.
I thought this was the land of the free. Instead, the United States comprises 5% o!
f the global population and 25% of the world's prison population according to an online British newspaper.
Patrick Murphy, the chief judge of the federal district court in East St. Louis, Ill., doles out long sentences nearly every week to drug dealers and traffickers.
He says those sentences haven't helped in his district: ?You're in East St. Louis. East St. Louis is crime-ridden, poverty-stricken, violent, dirty, dangerous, and here the sentences are the longest and the hardest anywhere in the federal judiciary ? Here, prosecutions happen regularly. Sentences are meted out long and hard. Hardest sentences in the United States, right here.?
What would he say to someone who claims that these tough mandatory sentences are taking drug kings and putting them out of business by locking them up in prison?
?What pass!
es for a drug king in 99 percent of the cases is nothing more than a y
oung man who can't even afford a lawyer when he's hauled into court. I've seen very few drug kings,? says Judge Murphy.
What he does see, however, is defendant after defendant like Brenda Valencia, who served 11 years of a 12 year - 7 month sentence for giving a drug dealer a ride - twice as many years as she would have gotten if she'd killed someone and been convicted of manslaughter.
So I'm better off killing someone in a drunk driving accident than giving a drug dealer a lift. Makes a lot of sense, huh?
Some drug traffickers do get lighter sentences by agreeing to testify against other traffickers. Why didn?t Valencia?s lawyer try to make a deal in her case?
?The other two people were already cooperating with the government. So they had the people they needed to cooperate,? says Valencia. ?And I didn't know anything, and I couldn't give the government any information.?
So l!
et me get this straight... Brenda Valencia gives a drug dealer a ride, and her sentence isn't reduced like the drug dealer in question because she doesn't have anyone to rat on.
Even conservatives on the Supreme Court are saying that Congress has gone too far. Last August, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, a Reagan appointee, told the American Bar Association, ?I accept neither the wisdom, the justice, nor the necessity of mandatory minimums.? Amen. |
