Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, February 8, 1993 TAG: 9302080023
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: BOSTON LENGTH: Medium
DRUG-RELATED IMPRISONMENT RISING
More people are being locked up for drug offenses - particularly minority youth - at a time when drug use is decreasing and other violent crimes are on the rise, the American Bar Association said Sunday."We have a criminal justice system in this country that is on a fast track to collapse" because of the heavy emphasis on drug enforcement, said Neal Sonnett, chairman of the ABA's criminal justice section.
"The criminal justice system is devoting more of its resources and attention to drug offenses and less to violent crime," Sonnett said. "Unless we do something now . . . we are going to have a criminal justice system that is crushed under the caseload of criminal cases without any appreciable decrease in crime."
Andrew Sonner, a prosecutor in Montgomery County Md., said he fears communities will continue cutting back on schools and libraries to pay for more jails and prisons to hold the increasing number of inmates.
But schools and libraries "have more to do with the prevention of crime than locking people up for [long] terms," Sonner said.
According to the report, arrests for drug offenses rose by 24 percent from 1985 to 1991 although household surveys during the same period showed that the share of the population using drugs dropped from 12 percent to 6 percent.
The number of adults in prison for drug offenses rose by 327 percent from 1986 to 1991, while the number imprisoned for all crimes rose by 50 percent and the number for violent crimes rose by 41 percent.
The 346,000 adults incarcerated for violent crimes in 1991 still was more than double the 165,000 imprisoned for drug crimes, but drug offenders make up a growing share of the nationwide prison population. Spending on law enforcement has become more heavily weighted toward prisons than police, the report said. Too often, Sonner said, violent criminals must be released from prison early to make room for drug offenders serving long mandatory sentences.
The ABA has long opposed the mandatory sentences required by federal law mainly for drug offenses. Previously, federal judges had wider discretion to set sentences for such crimes.
Sonnett said it would be wrong to attribute the decline in drug use to the increasing arrests and imprisonments. Instead, he said, public education has made drug use less socially acceptable.
Alfred Blumstein, dean of public policy and management at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, said in an interview earlier in the weekend that statistics have shown that cocaine use peaked in 1982 and began dropping. "The crackdown on drugs is really a post-1985 phenomenon," he said. "It's tough to attribute the decline very much to the war on drugs."
The report showed that minority adults arrested for drug crimes rose by 57 percent from 1986 to 1991, while nonminority arrests rose by 6 percent. While just under one-third of all those arrested in 1991 were minorities, they made up half of the nation's prison population in 1990, according to the report.