Friday, Jul 4, 2008
Two million Americans are locked up, most for nonviolent drug offenses. Some maverick Republicans -- yes, Republicans -- are trying to change that.
Jul 31, 2000 | In Philadelphia in 1790, not too far from the site of next week's Republican National Convention, the state of Pennsylvania inaugurated an American experiment: the Walnut Street Penitentiary. It was the first modern prison, and it replaced the stocks, the gallows and beatings with solitary confinement and enforced silence.
I doubt any convention speakers will invoke the Walnut Street Penitentiary from the convention platform. They'll probably stick to the Liberty Bell and Ben Franklin. But the original American prison might be the better symbol, as a national study released Thursday by a Washington criminal-justice think tank makes clear.
"Poor Prescription: the Costs of Imprisoning Drug Offenders in the United States," published by the Justice Policy Institute, reveals in stark terms the consequences of the bipartisan, two-decade love affair with mandatory sentences and harsh drug policies. The nation's prison population now stands at 2 million, but according to the report, this has less to do with making streets safer than with locking up nonviolent drug users.
According to the Justice Policy Institute study, while the number of people in state prisons for violent crime has doubled since 1980, the number of nonviolent offenders behind bars has tripled -- and the number of people incarcerated for drug offenses has gone up more than 11-fold.
Appearing on the eve of the Republican convention, the Justice Policy Institute's study also underscores a historic irony: In many cases it is Republicans, not Democrats, who are beginning to ask the hard questions about the drug war -- including some prominent Republican officials who will be descending on Philadelphia.
One of them is California Rep. Tom Campbell of Silicon Valley, who took part in the Justice Policy Institute's press conference on the study. Campbell, now running for Senate against ardent drug-warrior Democrat Dianne Feinstein is by his own admission, "pretty far out there" in traditional Republican terms, arguing for medicinal marijuana, treatment in place of prison and Zurich-style experiments with supplying addicts with their fix. Campbell will address the alternative "Shadow Convention" on Tuesday about the drug war issue.
But while he is a maverick, Campbell is not as isolated as he would have been, say, at the last Republican National Convention. Just as it was Republican Gov. George Ryan of Illinois who imposed the first death penalty moratorium, recently a handful of Republican leaders have taken more than tentative steps into drug reform terrain, which until now was considered off-limits to any serious politician.
Michigan's Republican governor, John Engler, for instance, has endorsed modifying his state's mandatory sentencing for drug offenders. New York Gov. George Pataki talks openly of reforming the state's notorious Rockefeller drug laws, responsible for one-third of all New York prisoners and the archetype for a generation of punitive drug laws nationwide. New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson supports the legalization of medicinal marijuana and turning from prison to treatment programs for addicts. Even Pennsylvania's Arlen Specter, a former prosecutor, has taken the first steps toward questioning the national drug strategy -- defying GOP leadership to vote against a massive military aid bill for Colombia.
How has the party of law-and-order Reaganism suddenly turned into a forum for debate over drug policy? "In part, there is an intellectual tradition which has paved the way," says Ethan Nadelman of the Lindesmith Center, the leading drug-policy reform think tank. "There is a libertarian streak in the Republican Party which has always favored a different approach." Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, columnist William F. Buckley and former Secretary of State George Shultz have all denounced the drug war as an infringement on individual freedom and choice.
But the small cadre of new GOP drug reformers like Campbell and Johnson represent a new phenomenon. "I am not coming at this as a libertarian," says Campbell. "I am a traditional Republican in that I value smaller government, limited government, and the drug war seems the opposite of that. But what really persuades me, candidly, is the pragmatics of it."
Campbell remembers voting in 1988 -- his first term in Congress -- for a bill that tried to combine cocaine interdiction with subsidizing imports of Latin American flowers -- hoping to convert growers from coke to blossoms. "I was full of optimism, even though flower growers in my district were furious. But you know what happened? Flower imports increased -- but so did coke. Interdiction is a losing game. Extermination of the drug crop is a losing game."
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