Prison conversion - criminologist and author John J. DiIulio Jr

Reason, August-Sept, 1999 by Jacob Sullum

In New York, Pataki has backed away from his initial criticism of the Rockefeller drug laws and suggested only marginal changes. Last May, he proposed allowing appellate judges to reduce the 15-year minimum to 10 years for first-time offenders convicted of possessing small drug amounts. Even that minor reform was tied to his demand for eliminating parole. Meanwhile, the Democratic legislators who were once reliable critics of the Rockefeller drug laws are avoiding the issue, worried about seeming soft on crime.

In other states, there is still support for cracking down even harder on drug offenders. Last year, a group of 38 Republican legislators in Kansas pushed a bill that would have required a life sentence without parole for anyone convicted of growing 100 or more marijuana plants. They were thus proposing to treat marijuana growers more harshly than first-degree murderers, who in Kansas are eligible for parole after serving 25 years.

Nevertheless, there has been a notable change in the climate of opinion among supporters of the war on drugs. Joseph Califano, president of the prohibitionist Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse, declared last year that "mandatory minimum sentences are a round-trip ticket back to jail and into a life of crime." Even Ed Meese, attorney general when Ronald Reagan signed the legislation establishing most of the current mandatory minimums, is having second thoughts. "I think mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenders ought to be reviewed," he told The New York Times in May. "We have to see who has been incarcerated and what has come from it."

Toward the end of his National Review article, DiIulio suggested that opponents of prohibition make it harder to win repeal of mandatory minimums because they "too often characterize all persons incarcerated for drug crimes as casualties of the War on Drugs." Libertarians, of course, would insist that thugs should be locked up for violating other people's rights, not for engaging in consensual activities such as drug dealing. And it's important to keep in mind that prohibition encourages property crime by inflating drug prices and fosters violence by creating a black market. More than one-fifth of the male prisoners in DiIulio et al.'s Manhattan Institute study said they got involved in crime to raise money for drugs, and some drug offenders may have a history of violence because they tried to protect their own lives and property within the context of a black market. We have no way of knowing whether these same individuals would be getting arrested in the absence of prohibition, but it seems likely that at least some of them would not.

Still, DiIulio has a point: It is easy for critics of the war on drugs to imagine that everyone locked up for drug offenses is a medical marijuana user or a hapless mule who swallowed condoms full of heroin out of financial desperation, rather than a vicious, ruthless criminal. But if opponents of prohibition have too rosy a view of drug offenders, policy wonks like DiIulio have been guilty of the opposite error, implying that virtually everyone incarcerated for a drug crime is a predatory criminal. The reality, it seems, is quite different, and DiIulio has been courageous enough to admit that. "You've got to give him credit for being willing to stick his neck out and change," says Stewart, the president of FAMM. "I wish politicians would do that too."