Federal Drug Convictions Double; Terms Longer

As the battle against drugs has captured national attention this decade, federal convictions of drug violators have more than doubled and prison terms for narcotics producers, dealers and users have grown longer than ever before, the Justice Department reported Sunday.

But law enforcement officials cautioned that the new data offers a mixed progress report on the war on drugs--reflecting the growing drug trafficking in the nation’s streets as well as a toughened response by police and the courts.

“This (report) shows that we’re moving in the right direction, but obviously we have a long way to go,” Los Angeles-based U.S. Atty. Robert C. Bonner said in an interview. “If we’re going to get serious about the drug problem facing the country, we’re going to have to get still-tougher sentencing so these dealers aren’t in a position to get back out (of prison) and reestablish their organizations so quickly.”

Even though prison sentences for drug offenders rose sharply through 1986--the last year tallied in the Justice Department report--Bonner and other law enforcement officials predicted even steeper prison terms in the future under stiffer minimums that were mandated nationwide in late 1986 for narcotics violations.

The report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, a branch of the Justice Department, indicated that heroin and cocaine trafficking made up three of every five federal drug convictions and accounted for the bulk of the overall surge in drug prosecutions. Convictions for those two drugs soared 190%.

The report dealt only with federal drug prosecutions. While the vast majority of all drug-related arrests are at the state and local level--more than 600,000 in 1986--federal investigators generally focus on larger scale and more serious cases of drug trafficking.

The report showed that, from 1980 to 1986:

--Federal drug convictions shot up 134% over the six-year period, from 5,244 in 1980 to 12,285 in 1986. The surge dwarfed a 27% increase in court convictions for other federal crimes.

--The average sentence ordered for someone convicted of a federal drug offense in 1986 was 5 years and 1 month, a 33% jump over the 1980 average sentence of 3 years and 10 months. That made drug offenses second in sentence length only to violent crimes, which drew an average sentence of 10 1/2 years.

Hardest hit by the toughened sentencing were general drug traffickers--made up increasingly of organized crime figures--who drew average sentences in 1986 of more than 16 years, up 748% from the beginning of the decade. The percentage of convicted drug offenders who were ordered to serve some prison time increased from 71% in 1980 to 77% in 1986.

--Suspected drug offenses made up one in every five criminal inquiries by federal prosecutors. Since 80% of those drug suspects were ultimately charged in court, drug offenders faced a greater rate of prosecution than any other type of criminal suspect.

“Those statistics say to me that the judiciary is taking an increasingly tough posture when dealing with drug traffickers” and that law enforcement officers “are bringing quality evidence to the courts,” Hubert Williams, president of the Police Foundation said.