ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, October 20, 1996 TAG: 9610210127
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The New York Times
The federal government's prosecution of drug crimes, far from sagging under President Clinton, has continued at about the pace set by President Bush, according to a study released this weekend.
The study, an analysis of drug prosecutions in 90 federal judicial districts across the United States, was done by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a research organization associated with Syracuse University that collects and analyzes information about the enforcement and regulatory activities of federal agencies.
Its co-directors, David Burnham and Susan Long, determined that the annual number of defendants in drug cases prosecuted by government lawyers escalated under President Reagan, to 19,038 in 1988 from 8,775 in 1981.
Under Bush, the prosecutions averaged 25,990 defendants a year, with a high of 28,585 in the 1992 election year. In the ensuing three years, 25,672 defendants, on average, were prosecuted annually under the Clinton administration.
Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole's campaign asserts that Clinton has been soft on drugs. It also suggests that it is the law enforcement agencies, not the White House, that have the greatest impact on drug arrests, prosecutions and convictions.
The analysis also supports complaints by law enforcement officials that the government's fight against illegal drugs has been poorly coordinated. An internal memorandum to Clinton on the matter by FBI Director Louis Freeh was seized on during the summer by Republicans as evidence that Clinton had let the war on drugs deteriorate. But the latest analysis shows that the problem also existed under his Republican predecessors.
``Internal administrative data from the Justice Department indicate that the criminal enforcement of federal drug laws around the country is an erratic and unplanned hodgepodge,'' Burnham wrote in an introduction to his group's findings.
By comparing the number of drug prosecutions with the populations for the federal judicial districts, the researchers concluded that law enforcement resources were inadequate for some cities afflicted by drugs.
For example, Burnham cited his finding that there had been 21/2 times as many referrals for prosecution in Miami as in Los Angeles, though they have comparable problems as gateways for international drug traffickers.
Under the formula used by the researchers, the lowest prosecution rates for federal drug crimes were in larger cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Newark, Boston and Chicago. The districts with the highest rates included smaller towns such as Charleston and Wheeling, W.Va.; Oxford, Miss.; and Asheville, N.C.
The analysis found that the prosecution and conviction rates in cases investigated by the Drug Enforcement Administration exceeded those of the FBI, the Customs Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
Last year, the researchers reported, government lawyers agreed to prosecute 78 percent of the defendants brought forward by the DEA, compared with 53 percent of defendants referred by other investigative agencies. The prosecutors won convictions in 55 percent of the DEA cases, compared with convictions in 37 percent of the cases submitted by other agencies.
Drug statistics tend to be imprecise because they rely primarily on arrests or prosecutions, which fail to measure the full extent of the country's drug problem.
The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse has the study on its World Wide Web site at http://trac.syr.edu/tracdea/
LENGTH: Medium: 69 lines ILLUSTRATION: GRAPHIC: Chart by AP.by CNB