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• Title: Introduction (Symposium: Drug Laws: Policy and Reform)
• Author : Stanford Law & Policy Review
• Release Date : January 22, 2009
• Genre: Law,Books,Professional & Technical,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 67 KB

Description

This symposium comes at a dramatic transitional moment in the evolution of our drug laws, and the editors and authors have provided their readers with an array of insights perfectly suited to this time of national self-appraisal. Most observers of the War on Drugs now accept that whatever its original intentions, it has misfired in ways that require a fair amount of self-criticism by our legal system. Meanwhile, binary views on the pros and cons of decriminalization of drugs have given way to less dramatic but more realistic considerations of efficacy and rationality in criminal justice, as reflected in the New York legislature's careful reconsideration and partial reform of the infamous Rockefeller mandatory minimum laws of the 1970s. Harsh criminal laws and penalties, even in the drug area, may deserve some credit for the great reduction in our crime rates in the 1990s, but as those rates level off, we have to ask whether we are getting fair return for our vast investment in them. It is this sense that drug laws are neither perfect righteous instruments of national survival nor unmitigated racist evils that is captured in Judge Robert Sweet's call for the mundane but crucial hard work of cost-benefit analysis in our drug laws. Judge Sweet had issued a stern clarion warning call in 1989 that the War on Drugs was as much a problem as a solution. Clearly entitled to an "I told you so" twenty years later, Judge Sweet first reminds us of the undeniable key facts: We have the highest incarceration rate in the world; over forty percent of our state inmates and a full half of our federal inmates are incarcerated for nonviolent drug crimes; drug arrests have tripled in the last three decades, with over eighty percent essentially for mere possession; the generic cocaine charge in the federal system will predictably lead to seven years in prison; and all this while cocaine use rates in the United States have remained unchanged. As Judge Sweet poignantly notes, the drug trafficking industry "remains untaxed and undeterred excerpt by street corner violence and drive-by shootings." The federal government spends many billions for drug control, even independent of prosecution and incarceration, but a pittance for proven programs of inmate rehabilitation. Federal judges are mandated by Congress to impose sentences that are "sufficient, but not greater than necessary," and yet they find this mandate undermined by Congress's own mandatory minimums and the absence of any rehabilitative mission in the correctional system.

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