The ‘Hustle

President George Bush, engaging in the time-honored tradition of issuing presidential pardons in the twilight of their term, pardoned former “Fugees” member John Forté. The artist was arrested at Newark International Airport in 2000, after accepting a briefcase containing $1.4 million worth of liquid cocaine. He was charged with possession with intent to distribute cocaine and conspiracy to distribute. Prosecutors alleged Forté hired two young women to pick up two packets of cocaine in Harlingen, TX and deliver them to New York City. The two were arrested at Hobby Airport in Houston, as they attempted to make their connecting flight to Newark. Forté, who then claimed he had no idea the women were carrying drugs, was nabbed when he went to the airport to meet the women. Convicted, he was sentenced to the mandatory minimum: 14 years in prison.

Fourteen years.

That’s a long time. Longer time than some murderers — well, manslaughterers, or homiciders, let’s not quibble over terminology — spend in prison, in fact. Why? Because mandatory minimum drug laws force judges to impose heavy, no-deal sentences.

Many judges — both liberal and conservative — agree that  mandatory minimum sentences are unfair, and that they hogtie judicial independence. They say the rules leave them unable to use their own discretion in evaluating individual cases. And for those to be sentenced, the penalties are truly scary: getting nabbed by the Feds with less than 10 Mary Jane plants results in a minimum of 5 years incarceration and a fine not to exceed $250,000.

That’s a quarter-mil fine, and 60 months in the slam for a few pounds of biomass. No wonder none other than Justice Anthony Kennedy of the Supreme Court calls them “harsh and unjust.”

Even conservative luminaries — the “law and order” set — like the late William F. Buckley, one of the most conservative public figures in the United States, was staunchly against mandatory minimums. He saw inherent unfairness in placing the non-violent crime of drug possession or trafficking on a par with murder or homicide. (Of note, conservative GOP Sen. Orrin Hatch (UT) lobbied for Forté’s release.) And of course, civil rights activists claim — with cause — that “mandatory minimums” are applied inordinately to African-Americans, and to a lesser extent, Latinos. Built-in discrimination.

Since 1986, when Congress enacted this inane bit of penal policy, the target audience, drug kingpins and large-scale importers have largely escaped its reach. While Congress intended mandatory sentences to target these “kingpins” and “managers” in drug distribution networks, the U.S. Sentencing Commission reports that only 5.5 percent of all federal crack cocaine defendants and 11 percent of federal drug defendants are high-level drug dealers.

Not a shining example of success. Even good baseball players hit the ball at least 1 out of 3 times.

So, whither the mandatory minimum sentence in the Obama Administration?

Well, simply, it’s time to do away with mandatory minimums. Period. Of course, political realities might make such a turnaround difficult or impossible. But, the truth is, these poor examples of penal policy simply don’t work. And, when one considers more than 80 percent of the increase in the federal prison population from 1985 to now is due to drug convictions, one can see that we’ve simply started to warehouse people, many of who are fairly harmless.

Now, I’m not suggesting that violent offenders be coddled or set free. They need to do maximum time. But again, why should a person pushing pot be in jail for as long, or longer than, the guy who pleaded down to manslaughter after killing his sexual rival, for example?

Worse, we may be creating better criminals. Low-level heretofore non-violent offenders, such as drug mules or street dealers, often end up serving longer sentences because they have little or no information to provide the government, no route to “trade up.” So, they stay in longer, and learn more about the fine art of criminality. As a friend of mine who was incarcerated once told me, all he learned about committing crime he learned in the Maryland State Penitentiary. His original crime: possession with intent to distribute marijuana.

He was stupid. Not dangerous.

Drug and penal policy in this country has been an abject and complete failure. The incarceration of those non-violent traffickers or dealers does nothing to reduce the number of dealers, nor the supply of drugs. It’s bankrupting states, and taxing the federal Bureau of Prisons, burdening the system, and costing taxpayers billions in direct and indirect costs.

Not only is it high time to stop taking away judge’s judgement — they are, after all, paid to judge and impose reasonable sentence — but it’s past time to stop trying to penalize our way to people not getting high, or enabling such.

This post is tagged Drug Policy, George Bush, John Forte, Prosecution, Punishment, Sentencing