ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, January 11, 1997 TAG: 9701130008
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SERIES: crime and punishment
SOURCE: JAN VERTEFEUILLE STAFF WRITER
Phyllis Jones says she knows there is little she can do to help her 34-year-old son beat his crack addiction. But she's not willing to make it any easier for him.
And when she found out that Phillip had spent a weekend on a binge in a crack house instead of visiting his daughter, she snapped.
Jones, 56, picked up an ax and demanded her son's friend take her to the Clifton Avenue Northwest spot.
The house was a shambles. It had no running water, lights or front door. A curtain pulled over the entrance blocked the view from the street. She confronted the dealers.
"I was infuriated. I was just enraged," she said. "I said, 'You know he's a crack addict, why do you let him in here?' All I was thinking about was my child. If they ever let him in there again, I was going to call police and have them closed down."
To make a point during that encounter two years ago, she grabbed the ax - and not because she feared the crack dealers, she said.
"It was just a symbol that I'm not going to take it anymore," she said. "I was raging."
When Phillip finally came out, his mother tried to reason with him to come home.
"I tried to appeal to what I put in him as a young child. ... It wasn't my son I was talking to."
Her son had reached a "barbarian state," she said, dropping out of society, working just a little bit to support his habit, stealing, dealing crack. He came home that night, but he was so angry with her she didn't hear from him again for six months.
He recently got out of prison in Georgia and entered a drug rehabilitation program, Jones said, but she hasn't heard from him in about a month. "He's still fighting the demons."
Crack had not only moved into her family's lives, it moved into her neighborhood. Around the same time, dealers set up shop in Jones' middle-class Northwest neighborhood, which borders one of the few open-air crack markets still thriving in Roanoke.
"When you come out of your house and see five or six guys on the corner, you know what's going on," she said. "They should be in school."
The crack trade is a double-edged sword in black communities. Most crack dealing takes place in black neighborhoods, making residents vulnerable to increased crime. But police crackdowns also mean a disproportionate number of blacks, mostly young men, are winding up in prison.
Not just prison - federal prison.
Local police send their most troubling crack cases to the tougher federal courts, as well as cases involving enough crack to trigger mandatory five-and 10-year sentences.
A review of drug cases prosecuted in Roanoke federal court in 1994 and '95 shows that it is mostly black defendants - most for selling crack - whose cases are "going federal."
Many blacks are ambivalent about the effect the government's "war on drugs" has had in their communities. While stopping the drug dealing is in everyone's interest, they are disturbed by the long-term incarceration of thousands of young black men nationwide.
Boys who grow up in poor black neighborhoods are "very easily influenced by money, power. They become drug dealers because they can make $400 a day," Jones said. "They just take the easy way out because they don't feel appreciated in this society."
Mothers and concerned citizens must organize to take action, she said. "Otherwise, we're producing generations of black males to go into prison. There's going to be a cultural revolution. People are going to get tired of seeing their kids locked up in prison."
* * *
Crack - powder cocaine that has been converted to solid, or "rock," form - came to Roanoke in the fall of 1988. It was brought here by two local entrepreneurs who quickly took advantage of the phenomenal profits and began bringing mass quantities down from New York, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's Roanoke office.
Nine years and hundreds of arrests later, crack is more plentiful and the price is the same, indicating that the supply has not been slowed. A rock of crack - about two-tenths of a gram - still costs $20.
But Roanoke Police Lt. Ron Carlisle said police have been effective, because they've been able to contain it within certain neighborhoods and certain segments of the population.
"I think we have made an impact because although crack is still in the Roanoke area, it hasn't spread widely through society," said Carlisle, who heads the vice unit.
The neighborhoods it's been confined to, however, are mostly low-income black neighborhoods. Most of the people driving into those neighborhoods to buy it are white.
"Ninety percent of my complaints are from [black] residents who see firsthand the devastation in their neighborhoods," Carlisle said. "It's not a black or white issue to them; they see it as an evil and it needs to be out of their neighborhood."
The job of cracking down on low-level drug dealing has increasingly been taken on by federal agencies, which have more resources than local and state police.
When crack hit American streets in the mid-1980s, the resulting panic over the highly addictive drug and the violence that often surrounds crack markets prompted Congress to approve severe federal penalties for selling the drug.
Crack dealers are more likely to carry weapons than dealers of other drugs, and they're more likely to have lengthy criminal histories.
Law enforcement officials also point out that cocaine that's smoked in rock form is much more insidious than what is commonly referred to as powder cocaine. It destroys the lives of users, making them give up their jobs and families and belongings in pursuit of a high that lasts only three to five minutes.
And though crack is cheaper per dose than powder, it ultimately is much more expensive because the high, though brief, is extremely addictive.
"You can't function on this. You can function on almost any other drug," said Don Lincoln, with the DEA. "There's nothing recreational about crack."
Federal officials say the reason most federal drug defendants in Roanoke are black is simple: Law enforcement's focus right now is on crack, and most people who sell that drug are black.
The crack trade in Roanoke has been brazen, too, with dealers literally hawking rocks on the sidewalks. Such drug dealers are easy to arrest. That's changing now, particularly after two large sweeps by Roanoke police last year resulted in 189 indictments against more than 100 street-level dealers.
"The pattern of crack distribution in the Western District [of Virginia] is the same as in the nation: There is more crack activity in black communities," U.S. Attorney Bob Crouch said. "As a consequence, people who live in those communities are victims of that activity."
Lincoln, the senior agent in the DEA's Roanoke office, said that under the Clinton administration the agency - which traditionally focused on pursuing kingpins and international interdiction - has turned its resources against violent, street-level dealers.
"We're responding to what the public is after," Lincoln said. "They don't want shootouts in the street. We don't go out and seek black crack dealers. We seek crack dealers.
"We have very limited resources. Shouldn't we go after the violence? Do we make this a Rainbow Coalition?"
He points out that the crime rate is dropping across the country.
"Could there be any connection, you think, with the fact we're locking these guys up?"
Perhaps the biggest benefits of federal involvement go to the small jurisdictions that lack the resources to combat sometimes overwhelming drug problems. They can turn to the U.S. Attorney's office for help - as in the case of Sandy Level in Henry County - and federal agents and prosecutors step in.
Sandy Level became a symbol of the crack problem in rural areas last spring when it was featured in U.S. News & World-Report. Residents felt under siege; indeed, a neighbor who complained to police about drug dealing was later shot seven times while sitting in her living room.
Federal officials joined the Sheriff's Office in a five-month undercover investigation that resulted in the arrest of 10 people, all black, who dealt a large amount of crack. All 10 cases were prosecuted in federal court, with the 23-year-old ringleader receiving a 35-year sentence, far longer than he likely would have got in state court. There is no parole in the federal system.
* * *
There is some debate over whether street-level crime should be a federal matter at all.
"I personally think [stopping street-level drug dealing] is a community thing," said former Roanoke Commonwealth's Attorney Bob Rider, now a criminal defense attorney. "The feds should be more actively catching the guy above."
But street-level dealers are more of a public nuisance and more visible. And local police like taking cases into federal court because the penalties are so much harsher than in state court. In 1980, just 3,127 drug cases were heard in federal court nationwide. In 1995, there were 15,288.
William Rehnquist, chief justice of the United States, has been a frequent critic of using federal courts to handle what used to be state and local crimes.
"Federalization of crimes has had enormous political appeal over the past decade, and hardly a congressional session goes by without an attempt to add new sections to the federal criminal code," the Supreme Court justice said in a speech a few years ago.
U.S. District Judge James Turk said he believes federal court should be reserved for kingpins and big dealers.
Carlisle agrees that crack dealers who are selling to support their own habit belong in state court. But for street dealers who sell a lot of crack, use violence or have a record of past convictions, he prefers federal court.
Without the federal court's involvement, "we definitely ... would not be as successful," Carlisle said. "Look what's going on in other cities. I think we benefit tremendously by having the DEA office and federal court in Roanoke. I'm not saying they're slighting anyone else, but they have to look at us every day."
And suspects know what it means when the police tell them their case is going federal, Carlisle said.
"They understand if it goes federal, no one's going to be Mickey Mousing around with him. They're quite aware. There's no fear of state court."
In federal court crack dealers usually face at least a five-year sentence. That's because the U.S. attorney's office requires that most cases it takes involve at least 5 grams of crack, the amount that triggers a mandatory five-year sentence. Lesser cases are left in state court.
"I'd say it's rare that we turn one down, but we do occasionally," said Crouch, because local police know what his office will accept. "The larger proportion of street crime is and ought to be handled at the state level."
But sometimes dealers who are repeat offenders and who have been getting short sentences in local courts will be recommended for prosecution by police.
"Under the federal guidelines, we may be able to get them off the streets and out of their communities for a much longer time," Crouch said.
In some cases, five-year sentences will help those convicted by keeping them from getting more deeply involved, said Melvin Hill, who has worked as both the regional drug prosecutor and as a defense attorney.
"The real question is, when those people get out after doing five years, what will they do?" he said. "It's not politically popular now to help the ex-convict. Society ought to be looking at the root causes, instead of locking people up. I think people think you're deterring crime [with] long sentences."
But he said society needs to understand what motivates young people to sell drugs, and that money is just one enticement.
With his former drug clients, he said, "money was part of it, but status was just as important."
Being a big dealer "buys you a certain status in the community these people didn't have in the first place. Compared to what else you can be doing, it's probably an exciting life. McDonald's versus drug dealing - there's no comparison from their point of view."
LENGTH: Long : 215 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: 1. DON PETERSEN STAFF. Phyllis Jones took an ax and wentby CNBlooking for her crack-addicted son in the house behind her to bring
him home. The Clifton Avenue Northwest crack house has since been
condemned. 2. Roger Hart. A crack dealer and customer conduct
atransaction in this Roanoke police video shot in May 1996. color.
Graphic: Chart by KRT.