Stiff Terms Have Little Impact on Drug Crime

The emergence of crack cocaine on city streets, with its accompanying vicious crime, has prompted a new wave of calls for tougher, harsher prison terms.

Federal and state lawmakers have passed laws increasing the penalties for drug offenses and imposing lengthy mandatory terms for some drug crimes.

They have done so even though a decade of “get-tough” laws and a massive expansion of the nation’s prison system has had little apparent effect on crime, according to corrections experts.

While the number of people in prison in the United States has more than doubled since 1978, and states have strained their budgets to build new institutions, crime has continued a cyclic pattern in which reported serious offenses have risen, fallen and risen again.

No Decrease Seen

“It hasn’t worked,” said Marci Brown, of the National Center on Crime and Delinquency in San Francisco. “Now there are more arrests, longer sentences, mandatory drug terms. As the sentences have gotten tougher and tougher, we haven’t seen any drop in crime rates.”

The continued call for long prison terms in response to drug violence threatens to further burden the nation’s overcrowded prisons, and impose staggering new construction costs on governments already coping with tight budgets.

The federal government, which has long had the model of a well-run prison system, suddenly has found itself with half again as many inmates as cells. It opened six new institutions last year, and last month announced an accelerated construction plan to build four new prisons this year and seven more by 1993.

The states have nearly doubled the number of their prison beds in the last decade, at a massive cost, but still find themselves 16% overcrowded--1% more than when they started the construction boom. They are now building 100 more jails and prisons, and the American Correctional Assn. estimates the current construction tab at $7 billion.

‘No Relation’

“The irony is the more cells you build, the more people you put in them. There’s absolutely no relation between how many people you lock up, and what happens to crime,” said Jerome G. Miller of the National Center of Institutions and Alternatives.

The number of serious offenses reported to police rose in the late 1970s, then decreased in the first half of this decade, and have risen slowly since 1985, according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports.

But drug offenses have loomed larger in those statistics. Between 1980 and 1986, the number of federal drug convictions rose 134% to make such crimes the fastest-increasing offense, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. In federal prisons, 44% of inmates are serving time for drug-related offenses.

Ironically, this comes at a time when most indicators suggest that overall drug use in the United States is decreasing. The annual survey of high school seniors, for example, has reported a decrease in the reported use of marijuana since 1979, and a decrease in use of all categories of drugs, including cocaine, last year.

The virulence of “crack” and the lawlessness of the turf battles between those selling it in the drug ghettos of cities like Washington, D.C., have spawned an outcry for action. Legislators often respond by passing tougher laws, arguing that those caught will at least be “immobilized” from committing further crimes while in prison. Nearly two-thirds of them will be rearrested within three years of their release, and while they are incarcerated, law officials say others will take their place on drug-market street corners.

‘Doesn’t Work’

“Their immediate statement is (that) we are getting tougher, we are getting these people off the streets and out of your neighborhoods,” said Brown. “It’s only later that you find out it doesn’t work, and somebody’s got to pay for it.”

The call for these laws continues despite the pitfalls of the early model for this tack, the tough Rockefeller drug laws of New York. In 1973, then-governor Nelson A. Rockefeller called drugs the “No.1 problem” of his state and proposed to “get tough” by imposing a mandatory term for anyone convicted of selling two ounces or more of marijuana and similarly small amounts of other drugs.

A 1977 study by the New York City Bar Assn. concluded that the laws had not reduced drug abuse or drug crimes, and that the criminal justice system resorted to plea-bargaining and other bureaucratic back alleys to circumvent the harsh sanctions.

Such evasions did not always work, and when the New York Legislature found first offenders and college students being given life sentences, they modified some of the Rockefeller laws in 1979. Although Rockefeller’s successors commuted the sentences of more than 100 people imprisoned under the laws, the 15-to-life penalty still applies for sale of cocaine and some other drugs.

Since arrests nationally are made in only about 20% of reported crimes--and many more crimes go unreported--it often is easier to demonstrate political determination on crime by increasing the penalties for those caught.

According to Nolan Jones of the National Governors Assn., many of the states this year passed laws calling for long prison terms for drug “kingpins,” severe penalties for selling drugs around schools and laws easing the seizure of the assets of drug dealers.

Congress imposed guidelines on the federal judiciary in November, 1987, that have lengthened the sentences of many offenses, and eliminated parole for those convicts. Congress made the drug offense categories even stiffer in 1988 Drug Abuse Act, guaranteeing that the predictions of the Federal Sentencing Commission of a 6% to 9% increase in prison population will be too low.

The new guidelines and the 1988 drug act are going to have “a dramatic impact” on federal prison population, said Helen Butler of the Bureau of Prisons.

State Facilities

Similar consequences are occurring in the states. Prison overcrowding is caused by both an increase in new inmates coming in, and by longer sentences being served by those already there.

“In the last 10 years, sentence length has gone up dramatically,” said Al Bronstein, head of the National Prison Project of the American Civil Liberties Union.

“At correctional meetings, all the talk is what to do with these older prisoners. We are going to have geriatric prisons,” he said. “The age is going up and up. They need special diets. They have special health problems. And how do you train these people? Do you sit them down at a computer and say this is what you will do when you get out? They aren’t getting out.”

The governments have tried to keep pace. The capacity of state and federal institutions jumped from 268,000 in 1978, to about 529,000 last year. But the prison population swelled from 307,000 during that period to 627,000, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The continued overcrowding has left 39 states under court orders or consent decrees to improve conditions, according to Bronstein.

And yet the nation’s prison population continues to grow by nearly 800 inmates a week, enough to fill two new prisons.

Alternatives to incarceration became a victim of public mistrust in the late 1970s. But faced with the staggering costs of building and operating an institution, some states have tried to come up with different approaches.

Minnesota has instituted sentencing guidelines that lower the sentences when the state’s prisons are filled. Delaware and Washington states have other guidelines that allow judges to put some offenders in special programs of close supervision and halfway houses. Some states are experimenting with electronic monitoring devices to enforce “house arrest.”

There is more talk that the solution to crime created by the demand for drugs is in treatment, not penalties. And Congress for the first time last year dictated that appropriations for the 1988 Drug Abuse Act be split evenly between enforcement and treatment.

But mostly, the response to crime remains the cry of lock-’em-up. “The legislatures are concerned about prison overcrowding, but they continue to pass these laws that strait-jacket the courts and send more inmates in,” said Tom Smith, associate director of the criminal justice section of the American Bar Assn. “It’s sort of like someone who wants to go on a diet but keeps eating.”