A Whole Generation Is Being Lost : Crime: Do we really want to lock up and make criminals out of hundreds of thousands of young people because their drug of choice is not ours?

Seated in the rear of a Superior Court room in downtown Los Angeles, Derrick Beckwith’s mother eyes me suspiciously, another white man asking questions that can only bring more problems to a son already waist-deep into trouble with the law. But Derrick, 25, dark-skinned, Jheri-curled and modestly dressed for his court appearance, nervously agrees to talk with me anyway.

In between whispered snatches of conversation, we watch the steady stream of mostly black young men being brought in for their three-to-five minutes of fast-food justice. Each wears a blue or orange L.A. County Jail jump suit, handcuffs and an expression of studied cool, the only vestige of dignity that can be mustered in a situation where one doesn’t make the slightest move without the direction of a keeper.

Derrick, however, isn’t feeling cool, facing, as he is, five years for a parole violation. “They trying to say,” he tells me, “that I was a witness to someone selling drugs. But I don’t know nothing about it, but they’re charging me with a violation ‘cause I was around the guy.” And what, I ask, was he on parole for? “Drugs, man. Possession and sale. That’s all it’s ever been. Period.” That, of course, is his story.

The cop’s story is that Beckwith was a lookout on a $20 sale of a rock of cocaine to an undercover officer. The girl who led the officer to the dealer and the dealer also have been arrested. Three people are thus facing felony charges over the sale of one $20 rock. Later in the day Beckwith will cop a plea and be sentenced to three years in state prison. There he’ll join about 90,000 other inmates, up from the 25,000 incarcerated in California prisons in 1980. About one-third of those are black males.

I’d gone to court to try to understand those and several other startling statistics I’d read just days before: One in four black men in their 20s in the United States is currently either in prison, in jail, on probation or on parole. One in four. And that number, as Alvin Poussaint, the black Harvard psychologist had pointed out to me earlier, is even worse than it sounds. When you exclude the vast portion of the black middle class who are in college or the Army, says Poussaint, what you’re really talking about is 50% of the young black male inner-city underclass.

Some of those arrests, of course, were for serious crimes like murder, manslaughter, rape and assault. Some were for violence among youth such as gang-banging; others were for drunk driving, a crime now vigorously enforced, and some were for robbery and theft. (The latter are crimes that young black males, about 30% of whom come from families living below the poverty line and 30% to 40% of whom are unemployed, commit in vastly disproportionate numbers. Blacks comprise about 12% of the population.)

But it is small-time drug crimes like Beckwith’s that are increasingly responsible for the huge numbers of young black men that are now overwhelming the criminal justice system in California and nationwide.

Out of 26 cases on Judge J.D. Smith’s calendar on this day, for example, 19 are for what public defender Forrest Latiner calls “chicken drug cases”--that is, the sale or possession of drugs, or the “testing dirty” for drugs once on probation or parole. “Our President,” he tells me disgustedly, “would be very excited over these cases.” Latiner puts the percentage of cases he defends in this category at between 50% and 70%. “It’s frightening,” says Judge Smith, a former LAPD motorcycle cop, “to think we’re losing a whole generation. You don’t even feel good when you sentence these guys.” In 1983, according to Smith, the Central Division of L.A. Superior Court handled about 5,000 cases. In 1989 they processed about 17,000, an increase in large measure because of the get-tough priorities of our war on drugs.

“We’re on an incarceration binge,” says Joan Petersilia, the director of the RAND Corp. criminal justice program. “We’re putting more people in prison, but because of overcrowding, they’re doing less time. That includes violent offenders too.” And when they get out, she adds, they are ex-cons, with all the problems to themselves and society that that entails. “We’re making this tremendous effort, but for what?” she asks. “Robbery, rape, aggravated assaults are all up and more dangerous in California, and we’ve tripled the prison population.”

There are, of course, no easy answers, but at the very least we should ask ourselves a few hard questions. Do we really want to continue to lock up and make criminals out of hundreds of thousands of young people because their drug of choice is not ours? When will we as a society stop thinking in the same way as Sal’s bigoted son in “Do the Right Thing,” who sees Eddie Murphy and Bill Cosby as heroes and the black underclass as subhumans? And lastly, how can we get George Bush to realize that coming to Los Angeles specifically to dedicate yet another new prison on the day before Derrick Beckwith is sentenced might not be the best way to symbolize a kinder, gentler America?