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OPINION
| UPDATED April 18
Winners and losers
As long as the government is allowed
to enforce unconstitutional conspiracy laws and unjust sentencing
practices, the country’s drug problem cannot be solved.
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| The Shorthorn: David DeGrand |
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We are in the throes of a brutal and divisive
war.
There are people who are strongly for this war and those who believe
we can accomplish the same goal through other means.
Those who wage this costly war are tucked away safely in their ivory
towers or underground bunkers. It is the civilian population and
those simply following orders who are this war’s casualties.
Because Saddam Hussein is nowhere to be found and an Iraqi regime
change is imminent, that is not the war I am speaking of. I am speaking
rather of the war we have been engulfed in (with very little to
show for it) for four-plus decades: the United States’ war
on drugs.
Even though the number of flaws in the United States drug policy
is roughly equal to the number of the country’s drug users,
this column will only point out two elements of our drug policy:
conspiracy laws and mandatory minimum sentencing.
Unlike most criminal cases, where proof is needed to establish “an
act to affect the object of conspiracy,” the simple act of
talking about breaking a drug law is enough to have a person convicted
of conspiracy to sell and/or distribute illegal drugs.
In essence, a person can be sent to federal prison on drug charges
without ever touching drugs or drug money.
These laws, by their very nature, do not prosecute people for what
they do but for what they know, who they know and, in some cases,
for what they did not know but should have. Isn’t this the
type of governmental abuse the Bill of Rights was designed to protect
us from? This type of blatant disregard for the Constitution should
be reserved for America’s enemies and not used against her
citizens.
As if these conspiracy laws were not enough of an infringement on
our guaranteed civil liberties, our government also employs a system
of mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses.
The best way to think of mandatory minimum sentencing is as “zero
tolerance.” The best way to think of “zero tolerance”
is “zero thought.”
This means that if a person is in possession of a certain amount
of drugs, no matter the reason, a judge is forced to impose a minimum
sentence, without giving thoughts to any mitigating circumstances.
For example, whether a person is caught in possession of five grams
of crack or 500 grams of cocaine, he or she is sentenced to five
years in federal prison with no chance of parole. That is truly
absurd.
With mandatory minimum sentences such as these, the average length
of jail time for a first-time drug offender (84.2 months) is almost
one year more than the average length of jail time for a first-time
child molester (76.4 months).
What makes this inhumane sentencing practice more despicable is
that our government figured out in the late ’60s that mandatory
sentencing did not work.
Congress saw drug use and the prison population both increasing,
so by 1970, nearly all mandatory sentencing laws were repealed.
But in 1986, our elected officials saw that drugs were a hot-button
issue. So Congress passed a new set of mandatory minimum sentencing
laws, even though it had been proven these laws did not work, so
they could say, “See, we are tough on drugs and crime.”
And the political pandering of those politicians has caused a disproportionate
number of blacks and Latinos to be caught up in our federal prison
system, the number of female inmates to triple since 1986 and about
60 percent (almost 66,000 people) of our federal inmates to be drug
offenders, most of whom are non-violent, first-time offenders.
No one knows what will work to solve this country’s drug problem.
But analysis of our drug war will show what does not work to solve
this problem. As long as we allow our government to enforce unconstitutional
conspiracy laws and unjust sentencing practices along with countless
other atrocities, we will never be able to explore other alternatives.
— Demond Reid is a journalism senior and a regular columnist
for The Shorthorn.
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