COLUMN ONE : Big Catch: Drug War’s Little Fish : More and more of the narcotics trade’s minor players are winding up behind bars, crowding prisons and jails. For one addict, the crackdown on small-timers has hit hard.

In the hush of a late summer night, America’s war on drugs came speeding around 5th Street onto Jefferson, a poor, used-up part of the city where cocaine is like a hearth that people huddle around.

The squad car was driven by a cop the local kids call Rat Boy. Two men were standing on the sidewalk, and they did not see him at first. This was careless. One of them had 5.18 grams of coke stashed in his left rear pants pocket.

Usually, a patrol car would have little chance of surprising anyone in this neighborhood. Drive within half a block of any action and the street punks are hollering “five-O” or “vice” or some such warning.

But it was uncommonly quiet that night last August, and Rat Boy, a wily one, had slowly steered the car along 5th, where a tall house at the corner hid his approach. At the turn, he hit the gas.

His eyes locked on the two men. One was a nobody drug shooter Rat Boy had busted before. The guy started to slink off, but the cop shouted him back.

The other was Michael Kelson, who stayed put, which is the smartest thing to do. Rat Boy won’t search you unless you run or drop your stuff.

“Give me some identification,” the cop ordered. And Kelson was still OK at that point, his freedom still his own to keep or lose.

Then he did a dumb thing. He reached into his pants for the ID and instead pulled out the cocaine. The plastic bag showed through the tense fingers of a clenched fist. And the cop thought: Well, well, lookie here.

Five grams is not a big supply, just about as much white powder as five packets of Sweet ‘n Low, a quantity Kelson might have snorted in a day or so. But in Delaware, that amount brings a minimum of at least three years in prison, no early release, no second chance, no parole.

This is not unusual these days. Something has been changing in the United States since the late 1980s, here and almost everywhere else. The Michael Kelsons of America--small-timers in the drug trade--are being caught and arrested at a rate remindful of minnows in a seine.

Every year, there are more tough drug laws on the books, more police on drug patrols, more judges, more prosecutors, more prisons--more of everything, even as there seems not enough of anything, with the exception of people to arrest. The war on drugs has become a great roundup.

Last year, the nation’s prison and jail population passed 1 million for the first time, double the number of 1980. At least another 2.8 million people were on probation and parole, meaning that one in every 50 adults in the United States was under the control of a corrections system.

Drug arrests are the main reason the numbers are up. In California, the percentage of drug offenders among prison admissions has nearly tripled in the last five years, to 37.6% of the total; in New York, it has tripled--to 45.4%.

This is not so much a matter of drug use. Actually, federal studies show a decline. But cocaine--cheap and plentiful--has saturated the nation’s poorer neighborhoods, where the avenues are often like drug-mart drive-throughs, the dealing so frantic it defies caution.

The many concerned people in those areas have asked for help, and the police have gotten tougher with street dealers, the most convenient to get tougher with. The courts are gridlocked with them, the prisons engorged.

But now people from all parts of the justice system are beginning to ask if this drug strategy makes the best sense: Maybe this is another war where hearts and minds ought to be more important than a body count.

Entire communities are being emptied of young men. “Jails of the United States more resemble those of South Africa with every passing day,” says Randolph N. Stone, chief public defender for Cook County, Ill.

In America, one in every four black men in their 20s is either in prison, jail or on probation or parole, according to an analysis by The Sentencing Project in Washington, which researches criminal justice issues.

In New York, 92% of those arrested for drugs in 1989 were black or Latino. In Florida, state researchers predict that by 1994, nearly half of the black men in the 18-to-34 age group will be locked up or under court supervision.

In Delaware, Michael Kelson--who is a 20-year-old first-time felon, a black man from the projects, an occasional longshoreman and a cocaine addict--was sentenced on March 23 to his mandatory three years.

And that was no outrage as things go, for Kelson is not an innocent man, or even an especially sympathetic one. He is just another drug user from a drug neighborhood caught in the drug roundup.

After he was booked that August night, they took him to Gander Hill, a prison in Wilmington that is also used for pretrial detention. The handcuffs were tight on his wrists. He imagined being locked away. He was scared.

It was late when he arrived, and the long corridors were quiet. They led him to a tiny cell. The bunk was hard and narrow. He tried to sleep, but thoughts jabbed through his mind and would not let up.

Then it was finally morning. The doors opened, and the prisoners moved into a big day room. Kelson heard his name shouted, and bodies rushed his way.

He saw familiar faces from the street--Deverle and Trick and Tony and Yo. It was like a reunion. And it brightened him up.

Here was the scene. Come weekends, Kelson or a friend would make it up to Aramingo Avenue in Philadelphia, where the coke was cheap. An “eight ball,” or 3.5 grams, was only about $100. Then he and his buddies would share.

The thing they liked to do was just hang out. Get high. Drink a beer. Eat some chips. Stand on the corner. Maybe ride around and hit a party.

Life makes you so tense, you need to find a way to chill out, Kelson says. He was working from time to time at the Port of Wilmington, loading cargo. But the hours were not always steady and neither was he.

To Chill the Worry

That’s the trade-off with cocaine. It makes you quit caring about things, he says. And this leads you in a circle. If you neglect things, you get more problems. Then you need more drugs to chill the worry.

He thought about giving it up once or twice, but the idea had no staying power. Cocaine was his routine. He was high or not, on or off, fast or slow.

This was the way for so many in the Southbridge projects, near the port. Of all the guys he grew up with, only two did not use drugs, Kelson says. And he did not understand them--or where their lives were going.

Maybe they disliked the constant hustle. People bought coke, then mixed it up with baking soda, halving the potency to double the bulk. Business was easy. A guy might pay you $10 just for a dip into your bag.

Police sometimes call this accommodation selling, dealing enough to pay for your own supply. It is the smallest of small-time. In Wilmington’s black projects, it helps that a lot of white people drive up to make a buy.

Of course, four, five years ago, hardly anybody from the neighborhood was into coke. People were smoking reefer and drinking cheap wine. Cocaine? Forget that. Cocaine was for the rich.

In fact, Kelson says, he first tried the stuff at a rich kid’s party while he was being bused into a white area for high school. The drugs were one of the few good things he remembers about class.

He could not read well and was always behind. They made him repeat the 11th grade, and he was desperate for a way out of the boredom. Then he got his wish. He was expelled for punching another kid in the mouth, really hard.

His mother’s new husband got him a job on the docks, but working was not much better than school, just more of being bossed around.

Then there was this girl. Erica Daniels was crazy about him. He’d been “having her sexual-wise and not really caring” since he was 14. She had two of his children, and now she wanted his attention as well.

It seemed the only thing easy was cocaine. Yet even with that, he had to keep coming up with cash. Then he had to watch out for the police who were always cruising up the street.

What the hell was that about, he wanted to know. Aren’t we allowed our own neighborhood? The cops were busting all the guys he chilled with. They might even get around to him.

He feared that, though he was able to lay it aside. Somehow it stuck in his mind that he would be OK. Why would they arrest him anyway? He didn’t give them any smart mouth. He was nobody big.

He had his own little thing. And that’s all.

Out-Toughing the Rest

Delaware, “the small wonder,” is a tiny state with a population about a fifth that of Los Angeles. This littleness has not stopped it from becoming the corporate home to more than half the nation’s Fortune 500 companies.

Laws here are friendly to corporations, which, if sued, enjoy a kind of home-court advantage. For this reason, downtown Wilmington glimmers with the tall glass jewels of a financial center’s skyline.

Corporate fees and taxes are a major source of revenues, though they have not protected the state from trouble at its edges. Delaware has some of the nation’s highest rates of incarceration and infant mortality.

Wilmington, its largest city, is 51% black. Poor neighborhoods at the feet of the tall buildings are beset with drugs. State officials blame this on the maelstrom of the Northeast Corridor: cocaine like some inescapable virus spread by the infected of New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore.

In recent polls, drugs have replaced development as the public’s leading concern. And that, says Atty. Gen. Charles M. Oberly III, has “everyone who runs for office trying to out-tough the next guy.”

Last year, lawmakers proposed 46 anti-drug bills, including one that called for drug dealers to be flogged. That would have returned Delaware to the days of the whipping post, once known here colloquially as Red Hannah.

For the time being, however, legislators settled for a new turn-up-the-heat trafficking statute, imposing a mandatory three-year term for anyone with 5 grams of cocaine.

“Traffickers” do not have to be caught selling, just holding. This means some mere users get convicted along with the hard-core dealers.

“But we wanted to send out a message that no drug behavior would be put up with,” says state Rep. Steven H. Amick, chairman of the Substance Abuse Committee in the Delaware House; and, in that regard, Delaware is far from alone.

In Indiana, judges can mete out 20-to-50 years for just 3 grams. In Georgia, a second offender recently got a life term for selling $20 worth of coke--or a quarter of a gram--to an undercover cop.

The war on drugs is in this sense retaliatory. Nearly 75% of what the federal government spends on the fight goes for law enforcement rather than treatment or education. State and local budgets are much the same.

Last year, as Delaware was getting tougher on the dealers, its treatment experts complained that the waiting list for residential drug programs was a year to 18 months long.

At the same time, corrections officials said their buildings were too crowded to be anything but warehouses. By various bookkeeping, the prisons were filled to anywhere from 110% to 160% of capacity.

“I don’t see any evidence of rehabilitation going on . . .,” complains Hank Risley, head of adult correction in Delaware. “We don’t have the resources.”

The drug war does not scale the prison walls. About 80% of the inmates arrive with drug or alcohol problems, Risley estimates. Once there, treatment is scarce--or non-existent.

Drugs, on the other hand, are rampant. How are they smuggled in? “One of four ways: north, south, east and west,” wryly observes one Delaware warden, Paul Howard. He would like to stop it, but how?

Besides, there are so many other problems in his prison. The ceilings leak. The showers are broken. The bunks are jammed together. His own office is so cramped he keeps files in an adjacent bathroom.

Delaware is one of 41 states, including California, that are under a court directive to improve conditions at some or all of their prisons.

Back in late 1988, Delaware agreed to fix the worst of things. In Gander Hill, classrooms were being used as makeshift dormitories to handle the great overflow of inmates.

Now, more than a year later, this is no longer true. The dorms are closed. The inmates have been moved.

They are doubled up in single-man cells--or packed four at a time into tiny, windowless chambers that were meant to be counselors’ offices.

Bang for the Buck

Not so long ago, in 1985, Charles Butler was the entire drug unit of the Delaware attorney general’s office. Now he heads a staff of seven prosecutors.

“The possession cases are choking us,” he says, rolling his head around as if the air is getting thin. “Possession cases, cases and cases.”

The war on drugs has brought extra money for local police from the Feds and the state. This puts more cops on the job--more bodies, more overtime.

And who are they busting, Butler asks, ready with the answer: a lot of little, piddling guys, that’s who. Guys with small amounts in their pocket. Guys they used to let go.

Of course, there is good reason to toss the big net. The public is tired of the scum who hang around on street corners, people droopy with drugs or feisty to make a deal. The streets do need a good sweeping.

And yet, to be honest about it, there are other explanations why so much of the effort is against street-level people.

“In Delaware, you’re just as likely to put away a $20 seller for three years as someone carrying an ounce (28 grams of cocaine) after a one-year investigation,” Butler says.

“So you get the same bang for your buck. Your stats look better if you’re working off a grant, and it doesn’t take a whole lot of brains to do it.”

Not that he is complaining. He is glad to handle the cases. No one could ever say Charles Butler is soft on drugs.

But he’d rather be prosecuting people higher up the ladder--the guys with smarts and connections and money. The cases that require surveillance. And wiretaps. And warrants.

These are hard to come by. And that is where all this talk about race comes into play. “Sure, it’s true we prosecute a high percentage of minorities for drugs,” he says.

“The simple fact is, if you have a population--minority or not--that is conducting most of their illegal business on the street, those cases are easy pickings for the police. . . .”

The problem of “your lower socioeconomic classes is that they don’t deal from inside their houses but out in the open,” Butler says.

“The problem of the underprivileged is they’re just too visible.”

Exciting Work

Every night, the same losers are on the corners, running hot on powdered fuel. Most act stupid and reckless. Then again, a few are wising up.

The buy-and-sell is getting less obvious, says Wilmington Police Officer Mark Lemon. A cop can’t make as many simple street rips these days, like he did with that Michael Kelson.

That was really something, with Kelson. This is Wilmington, and Wilmington is not Philly. Here, 2 to 3 grams is considered a big pop on a street bust. So nailing a guy that easily on a trafficking rap is pretty unusual.

Nowadays, everyone knows what the undercover cars look like. They recognize all the cops. For sure, they know Lemon. He is the one they call Rat Boy.

His face is thin and angular with a whiskery mustache. What can a cop do about a nickname? He says he doesn’t mind it all that much, except when he hears it at someplace like a mall, when his wife is with him.

Officer Lemon is 30, a four-year veteran. After a while, cops develop different interests--traffic or community service or whatever. His goal is to move into vice and go after drug dealers full time.

The war on drugs has become a specialty of his. The department has received extra money for enforcement. It uses it to pay overtime to officers who cruise the streets in something called Operation Clean.

Sgt. Jim Strawbridge is Lemon’s boss on the detail. He says the officers who make the most drug arrests get the most overtime. With an officer’s annual salary at not much more than $20,000, that OT is very welcome.

Lemon is so good he gets the maximum hours. He is the type who will lie in the weeds or hide behind a dumpster, waiting to see a deal. He is not afraid of chasing a suspect into the dark, either.

It is exciting work. “I’d like to go to New York or L.A. and see what goes on there,” he says. “It’s such a bigger scale than what we’ve got. . . .

“Here, we get guys beat up or cut, but there isn’t the murder. I never get guys with guns. Maybe, in all my arrests, I’ve had two or three. This is small-time. They won’t be making a TV show here.”

For him, Michael Kelson was a big case. Rat Boy did not say much to him in the squad car. He is tired of these creeps. They have no honor. They all want to turn in some so-and-so if you’ll just let them walk away this time.

Besides, he was antsy to get back to the station and put the plastic bag onto the scale. He was curious. The bag had some weight.

He watched the dial go to just over 5 grams. Then he said to himself: “I’ve got me a 4753A here, a trafficking charge.”

And he knew that three years had just dropped off the top of this guy Kelson’s life.

‘I’m in Jail’

Erica Daniels, 20, is a teacher in a Head Start program. She has loved Michael Kelson for six years. It has been hard love, the kind that is mostly one-way, the few good times always leaving the coals at a smolder.

Her love has waited for his to catch up, sometimes circling back to make it easier. “I’ve just always had faith that we’d be together,” she says.

She was pregnant with their first child at age 14. Michael denied being the father. Then he saw the baby and recognized a glint of himself in the face: OK, it’s mine, he said. What do you want me to do about it?

Their futures parted. Erica went on to become a high school grad and, by her own reckoning, “a square,” though even she experimented with drugs.

But cocaine carried no magnet for her. “And if you don’t use drugs, that excludes you from just about everything in the neighborhood,” she says.

She and Kelson were so different; she was quiet and studious. She wanted to change him but instead he became more like himself all the time.

Then last year, something seemed to click. The two of them talked of getting a house, and the idea took on some real shape.

Kelson had a job, and they were saving money together in a hiding place in a closet. The children were older, 5 and 2, and appeared more like actual people to him. They called him “daddy,” and he said he enjoyed that.

In fact, he had just seen them in the hours before he ventured off to 5th and Jefferson, on that summer night when the war on drugs would take him away. Erica got a call the next day.

“I’m in jail,” he said, and she thought he was kidding, because that was like him. Then he went on, “I had drugs,” and that scooped the breath right out of her.

Erica knew he used cocaine, of course. She had seen him with the dealers and once even went through his pockets and found residue in a plastic bag.

But they rarely spoke of it. Only Michael’s mother, Carolyn, was able to confront him. He lived in her house, and she was always suspicious.

She demanded to know how he got $90 sneakers or a fancy pair of jeans. Either he was working more than he told her or he was out selling drugs.

She wanted answers. “He was always saying: ‘I’m a man and no one tells me what to do,’ ” she says. “He’s like all the rest of them, you know.”

Too many of the young men had turned wild. People could hardly walk to the park without one of them rushing up, trying to peddle them something.

At least, that’s the way it was until these last few months. Now, Carolyn says, the police have clamped down hard. And thank God for that.

They are cleaning up the place. It is safer.

A Sea of Drug Cases

National crime statistics take a while to gather, but those for 1988, the most recent year available, show more than 1 million drug arrests, nearly double those of five years before, according to the U.S. Justice Department.

While only some of these arrests resulted in a prison or jail term, most did require a judge’s attention. The nation’s courthouses are more and more like funnels with the top end too big for the bottom.

In the federal system, drug cases now make up 44% of all criminal trials, enough of an increase that the Judicial Conference of the United States last year told Congress there was “a lack of adequate resources to cope.”

State courts are overwhelmed, too. On a recent, randomly-chosen day, 52% of the docket in Delaware Superior Court involved drugs.

“We’re just drowning in a sea of drug cases,” said Judge Norman Barron; one case among the deluge coming his way was The State of Delaware vs. Michael Kelson.

A year ago, the defendant probably would have bargained a guilty plea for a lesser charge. There would have been no trial--and maybe even no prison time.

But the attorney general has a new policy: no deals in trafficking cases. After all, the Legislature was emphatic. And that’s how democracy works.

Michael Kelson tried to hire a private attorney, but the fee was $1,000 up front. “Where am I going to get that?” he asked.

His case was given to a public defender, who, under the press of a doubling roster of clients, met with him only once before going to court.

At the prosecutor’s office, things were equally hectic. Just one day before the trial, the Kelson case was bounced to Larry Lewis, the new man on staff. It would be his first time before a jury.

Don’t worry, Lewis was told. These cases are so routine a windup toy could handle them. All you need to do is guide along the witnesses: the arresting officer, the evidence custodian, the technician who tested the cocaine.

There is even a formula to the questions. A rookie prosecutor can lift them right out of a textbook. Lewis did exactly that, trying to sound like a veteran and wearing his best suit, the dark blue pinstripe.

Q: Let me ask you, do you see that man that you saw at that time in this courtroom today?

Officer Lemon: Yes, I do.

Q: Could you point him out?

A: He’s sitting at the defendant’s table with a white-and-blue striped shirt.

Michael Kelson was in a spin as he listened. At times he stared at the all-white jury, wondering how different they were from him and how much the same.

He wanted badly to explain his side, which as he saw it involved a kind of mix-up, a mistake in measurement. Finally, his chance came:

Yes, the cocaine was his. Yes, he bought it in Philadelphia. No, he was not aware it was 5 grams. In fact, he thought he had purchased less, an “eight ball,” maybe 3 to 4 grams. The rest was extra, a windfall.

This matter-of-fact explanation, perhaps sensible enough on the street, sounded more like a confession in a court of law. Larry Lewis did not need much time for cross-examination.

He asked Kelson: Why were you also holding five plastic bags, empty except for a light dusting of cocaine? And the answer to that was that a drug user always saves his empties.

Kelson: (If) I don’t have no drugs, I lick the bag to get enough.

Lewis: Thank you. I have no further questions.

For a few moments, in the hallway, the inexperienced prosecutor let what confidence he had slip away. His adrenaline had been a gush. His questions had sometimes meandered. How can you tell with a jury? He might have botched it.

But the anxiety did not last long. A guilty verdict was returned in just a few minutes. There was a cheering section in the gallery. Friends in the courthouse had come to catch Lewis’ first victory.

He smiled a few times as he shook hands, though decorum restrained him. After all, another man had just lost his freedom. In a glance, a chance afterthought, he had seen Kelson being led away, nervous and upset.

Larry Lewis did not celebrate until later, when his boss, Charles Butler, treated him to lunch at the DuPont Hotel, the best place in town.

One Upbeat Person

Last year, the states and the federal government spent $5.2 billion for new prisons, roughly the same amount the federal government allocated for drug prevention and treatment in the entire decade of the 1980s.

But even this building boom is not enough. Overcrowding remains at historic highs in most prison systems, near 100% of capacity or above. Many states operate under court-ordered population caps.

These caps, in effect, set prisoners free at the same pace new ones arrive. The trade is not always even, the multiplying numbers of drug addicts and dealers often forcing the early release of robbers and rapists and worse.

This disturbs officials. One favored response is to keep building. Prisons are the fastest-growing part of many state budgets; and local towns often welcome penitentiaries for the jobs they bring.

But in Delaware, where unemployment was only 3.5% in 1989, people do not want criminals kept anywhere near them. The Legislature has voted to build a new prison, but disputes about a site have held things up for years.

In 1987, a governor’s task force reported that Gander Hill was “badly overcrowded” with 567 inmates. Recently, the total has risen to 782. This includes the convicted drug trafficker Michael Kelson.

These days, Kelson spends his time playing cards and watching TV. The prison is too crowded for much in the way of inmate jobs or training. He is on a waiting list for a structured drug program, but that list is long, maybe years long.

He insists that he was no drug dealer; a dealer is “someone who makes a living off it, with a good car and gold chains and no legitimate job,” he says. Or at least someone with spare money. “That’s not me.”

Still, he did have 5.18 grams in his pocket on Aug. 1, 1989--and now he has three empty years ahead. Will the days behind bars change him for the better? Opinions on that tend to be gloomy.

Judge Barron regrets that he had no discretion in sentencing. “I’d have preferred less jail time and then probation on the condition of successful completion of drug treatment,” he says.

Elizabeth Neal, Gander Hill’s warden, complains that too many Kelsons are sent her way: “People on a self-destructive course are not helped by being locked up for three years. That just delays the self-destruction.”

Even Lemon, the police officer, though glad his bust led to a conviction, is unsure that prison will do any good: “He’ll come out with no money, no job. What’s he going to do? He’ll sell drugs is my guess.

“You know, I try not to think about this stuff too much, but I sometimes wonder how anyone could make it out there, just standing around night after night, the drugs all around them.”

The weird thing is, Michael Kelson is the one upbeat person among them. Maybe he is naive. Maybe he does not know how a short prison term often presages a longer one, like a stumble before a fall.

But he says he can handle the time OK. The future seems reachable to him, and his image of it is as welcome and simple as a child’s. The arrest has brought him clarity. He considers himself a family man.

Erica Daniels visits when she can. They speak through a security phone, staring at each other through the thick glass. Sometimes, they put the phone down and try to read each other’s lips.

Michael promises they will get married and he will find steady work. He sees himself moving freight at the wheel of a forklift, earning $14 an hour.

After work, the streets may tempt him. Drugs are inevitable, like rhythm in a song. But when he needs to chill, he promises to find other ways to do it.

And that will be his freedom, away from the cocaine and the police, the two things that swallow up a man like him, one after the other.

Adult Arrests for Drug Violation Arrested for: Possession: Total for 1988: 1,050,576 Source: Estimates from U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics and F.B.I. Federal Spending on War on Drugs 1981 $1,138 (Budget authority total) Drug law enforcement: 70.3% Drug abuse, prevention and treatment: 29.7% 1982 $1,310.6 Drug law enforcement: 77.9 Drug abuse, prevention and treatment: 22.1 1983 $1,536.6 Drug law enforcement: 78.6 Drug abuse, prevention and treatment: 21.4 1984 $1,844.8 Drug law enforcement: 81.2 Drug abuse, prevention and treatment: 18.8 1985 $2,145.9 Drug law enforcement: 82.5 Drug abuse, prevention and treatment: 17.5 1986 $2,269.1 Drug law enforcement: 82.6 Drug abuse, prevention and treatment: 17.4 1987 $4,026.3 Drug law enforcement: 76.5 Drug abuse, prevention and treatment: 23.5 1988 $3,822.5 Drug law enforcement: 73.7 Drug abuse, prevention and treatment: 26.3 1989 $6,302 Drug law enforcement: 75.2 Drug abuse, prevention and treatment: 24.8 1990 $9,483 Drug law enforcement: 74.1 Drug abuse, prevention and treatment: 25.9 In millions of dollars Source: 1981-88 Office of Management and Budget, 1989-1990 Office of National Drug Control Policy Times researcher Anna M. Virtue contributed to the reporting of this story.