 November
15, 2005 - News & Observer (NC)
Drug Sentences Under Scrutiny
Forum Addresses Prison Overcrowding
By Thomasi McDonald
Describing the war on drugs as "an utter failure, a total
failure," a former N.C. Supreme Court chief justice said
Monday that the state should consider decriminalizing drug offenses
to reduce the need for additional prisons.
"What if we decriminalized drugs?" Burley B. Mitchell
Jr. asked at a forum on prisons in downtown Raleigh. "If
you knock out all the profits, then there would be no more Colombian
cartel. There would be no more Mexican cartel. They would be
broken."
Drug offenses should be treated as a medical problem, he added.
"God, what could we do with the money we spend on sending
people to jail?" Mitchell said.
Mitchell, who was chief justice from 1995 through 1999, was
one of three panel members for "Getting Smart on Crime:
Facing North Carolina's Prison Crisis," at the Exploris
Museum.
The forum was co-hosted by N.C. Policy Watch, an organization with the
goal of changing the way government officials debate issues,
and Families Against
Mandatory Minimums, a national nonprofit that challenges
sentencing laws.
About 50 community activists, legislators and others attended
the event, which focused on the state's prison bed crisis and
the disproportionate numbers of blacks in prison.
A second panelist, Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project, a criminal justice
research and advocacy nonprofit in Washington, noted that the
United States has 2 million people behind bars on any given day.
Nationally, more than half of all federal prisoners are in for
drug offenses.
"The United States is the world leader in the numbers
of people it locks up," Mauer said. "We have just replaced
Russia."
The prison population has been rising exponentially since
the 1970s. Mauer attributed the growth to changes in criminal
justice policy instead of rising crime.
Those polices include the 1980s war on drugs, and get-tough
policies in the 1990s such as three-strike sentencing and mandatory
minimums.
"We are sending more people to prison, and we are keeping
them there for a longer period of time," Mauer said.
Projections by the N.C. Sentencing Commission indicate that
at current incarceration rates, the state will need 10,000 new
prisoner beds by 2010.
Forum organizers noted that blacks make up about 59 percent
of the state's total prison population and 72 percent of people
convicted as habitual offenders.
"The toll that the criminal justice system is having
on the black community across the state and nation is unforgivable,"
said panelist Dan Blue, a former speaker of the N.C. House. Blue
said violent offenders should be treated more severely, along
with white-collar criminals who wreak substantial economic damage.
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