Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 20, 1990 TAG: 9005200287
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Barry Bearak Los Angeles Times
DATELINE: WILMINGTON, DEL. LENGTH: Long
The squad car was driven by a Mark Lemon, a cop the local kids call Rat Boy. Two men were standing on the sidewalk and they did not see him at first. 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 a half block of any action and the street punks are hollering "five-0" 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 onto the two men. One was a nobody drug-shooter that 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 someone unless he runs or drops his 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. The Michael Kelsons of America - small-timers in the drug trade - are being caught and arrested like 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 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 past five years, to 37.6 percent of the total. In New York, it has tripled - to 45.4 percent.
This is not so much a matter of drug use. Actually, some 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 percent of those arrested for drugs in 1989 were black or Latino. In Florida, state researchers predict that by 1994 nearly half 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 March 23 to the mandatory three years.
Erica Daniels was crazy about Kelson. She had two of his children and now she wanted his attention as well.
She got pregnant with their first child when she was 14. Michael had 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. Now 20, she is a teacher in a Head Start program.
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 5 and 2. They called him "daddy" and 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 took 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.
Wilmington, Delaware's largest city, is 51 percent 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 spread from New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore.
In recent polls, drugs have replaced development as the public's leading concern. And that, says Attorney General Charles Oberly, 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.
Instead, legislators settled for a new turn-up-the-heat trafficking statute, imposing a mandatory three-year term for anyone with five 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.
The war on drugs is in this sense retaliatory. Nearly 75 percent 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 12 to 18 months long.
At the same time, corrections officials said their buildings were too crowded to be anything but warehouses.
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? A lot of little, piddling guys, that's who, says Charles Butler, head of the drug unit of the Delaware attorney general's office. They're guys with small amounts in their pocket, guys they used to let go, 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 socio-economic 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."
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. Department of Justice.
In the federal system, drug cases now make up 44 percent 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."
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 percent 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, rapists and worse.
These days, Michael Kelson, one of those in the revolving-door system, 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.
Even the policeman, Mark Lemon, who arrested Kelson, 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."
by CNB