Saturday, Jul 5, 2008
Busted on a minor charge, I joined the luckless army of minorities who are crammed into jail cells every day by America's surreal war on marijuana.
Oct 17, 2002 | Little wigga Justin, 17, stoned and first time in jail but not scared at all, was entertaining the prisoners with stories of rich girls. There was Diana from New Jersey. Diana had daddy's mansion and her own pool; golden electronic fish swam in the water -- "Yeah, yo, battery-powered fish, all gold and shit, Diana swims with 'em, nigga. Rich, yo, rich bitch, I mean like this girl has diamonds from shoulder to shoulder that say D-I-A-N-A like a big smile, and the trucks yo, the Escalades, the ML430s, and the mansion -- Diana's room has electric sliding doors; you clap, they open like magic. Diana!"
"Diana," murmured Syringe, junkie of name unknown, old soiled longhair, nodding out and toothless and splayed -- "Diana," then he passed out. Justin watched with interest. Syringe looked like Kentucky Appalachia, but talked Brooklyn, old Italian Brooklyn, that is, no niggas or yo or bro, an old junkie-hippie in jean jacket and dirty jeans with a blue bandanna across his forehead; he carried a syringe -- no drugs, just a syringe.
"I wasn't doin' nothin', walkin' along, mindin' my business," he had told us. "I'm not an asshole, I'm not breakin' anybody's balls, I'm walkin' along, they fuckin' stop me --"
Typical. I heard it again and again: Rousted on a spurious charge -- misdemeanor possession -- and now the creep was off the streets of my hometown neighborhood of Red Hook, in Brooklyn, lodged safely here in the cinderblock ugliness that is the 76th Precinct of the NYPD, and toiled over by cops and clerks and DAs who know, if they have a conscience, that driving a man like chattel just because he carries a syringe doesn't make sense.
So it was Syringe and Justin and me and four others in the 6-by-8 cell stuffed at midnight, waiting to be judged. Aside from my own case -- disorderly conduct, too much booze -- everyone in that cell, and almost every single prisoner I spoke with passing from pen to pen that long rotten night of Aug. 21, was in on a drug charge so lite and ludicrous even the jailers admitted "This is bullshit, guys, nothin'; you'll be out by 10 a.m."
The charge, with astonishing consistency, was not dope or coke but marijuana "possession," or at least that's what the authorities term 10 leaf-flakes in the bottom of a pocket, or a roach in the car ashtray rotting among cigarette butts, or a pipe that looks used; "bullshit" indeed, yet prosecuted to the fullest and costliest extent in the paws of a drug enforcement system that's lost all logic.
The cells fill up, spill over: Minor marijuana offenses now comprise 15 percent of all arrests in New York City. Justice here wasn't always like this. Once upon a time, when I was growing up in Brooklyn in the '80s and early '90s, a joint, a dime bag, even a "50 bag" -- basically anything under an ounce -- meant a small fine, issued on the spot, or sometimes a "desk appearance ticket," a DAT, which stipulated a date and time for meeting the judge. You showed up, you waited in the pews until your name was called, you stood with hung head until the judge dismissed the case or fined you a few dozen dollars.
That was tiresome enough, but at the very least it was an attempt to implement, at the street level and in the precincts, the general decriminalization of minor marijuana possession that the New York state Legislature had mandated through the Marijuana Reform Act of 1977. Even then, lawmakers "were concerned over the large amount of criminal justice resources and prison space being used for marijuana offenders," observed the Partnership for Responsible Drug Information, a nonprofit in Manhattan that has been critical of the drug war. The legislators, wrote the PRDI, concluded that "criminal prosecution and incarceration were inappropriate penalties for mere possession and use of marijuana."
Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who came into office in 1994, reversed all that. He was the reform mayor, the hero mayor who, with a draconian sweep of his arm, would clean up the crack-and-murder mess into which ghettos like Red Hook had descended by the late '80s. In this regard, Giuliani was more lucky than visionary, the unwitting beneficiary of a skyrocketing stock market and crime rates that fell nationwide in the bubble boom -- rates that had already begun a decline in New York as early as 1990. (By then the crackheads were killing themselves off; the dealers were busy killing each other.)
But Giuliani took credit -- it was "quality-of-life" policing, he would say later, that solved the crime problem in New York. Quality-of-life, or zero-tolerance enforcement, one of Giuliani's pet programs, was simple and easy and sometimes cruel: Nuisance was crushed in all its most trivial forms -- the graffiti taggers on subways, the squeegee bums on roadways, the confused, muttering homeless on benches, and of course the relatively benign bottom-tier of the marijuana trade, the smoker.
In 1992, New York City had 742 marijuana possession arrests; by 2000, after six years of Giuliani, that number had risen a mind-boggling 7,000 percent, to more than 52,000, according to FBI statistics. The numbers aren't changing under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, elected last year. New York City's five counties now rank among the top 10 U.S. counties of 250,000 people or more for marijuana arrests -- one city, New York, that cosmopolite center of all things progressive, now accounts for 8 percent of all marijuana possession arrests nationwide.
Enforcement comes down primarily on people of color. According to a 1996 report from the New York state Division of Criminal Justice Services, 71 percent of state residents arrested on misdemeanor marijuana charges were nonwhite; in Red Hook, that's usually a black or Hispanic from a low-income housing project.
"About six years ago, they just stopped giving the DATs for weed," says Santiago Lugo, 24, a Puerto Rican in my cell. "Now they cuff your ass, they take you in, they get your fingerprints, they get your photograph, they work your ass through the system."
"It isn't right," says Lugo. Which is fairly obvious from afar, but not nearly as obvious as when you go through the system yourself, as a defendant, and watch the monumental frittering of law enforcement energies, the Kafkaesque merry-go-round where more often than not the whole dirty, inept, stultifying process ends in the case being dismissed -- as if it never happened.
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