Drug Offenders

After a fierce debate in which some lawmakers raised concerns about the effectiveness of the nation's war on drugs, the Maryland House of Delegates defeated by one vote a bill to allow some second-time drug offenders to become eligible for parole. Lawmakers opposing the measure, which failed 68-69, said it would reward drug dealers and gang members while making communities more dangerous. "They are going to get more lenient treatment under the provision of this bill," said Del Anthony J. O'Donnell, the House minority leader from Southern Maryland.

WITH HIS nebulous response to the question of whether he has ever used illegal narcotics, George W. Bush may be doing the nation a great service.The spectacle of the current feeding frenzy is as ugly as always -- but for once the "politics of personal destruction" may encourage an overdue debate about real public policy issues:Are the laws that send thousands of people to prison every year for drug possession administered fairly? Is justice served by incarcerating young, nonviolent drug offenders?

IN A political world where more and more politicians let their pollsters tell them what to think, it's refreshing to discover Gov. Gary Johnson of New Mexico, a man who says what he thinks.Mr. Johnson has become one of the first high-ranking elected officials to question the war on drugs. "I believe that our war on drugs has been a dismal failure," he told the Taos Chamber of Commerce."We are putting more and more money into a war that we are absolutely losing."Hard to argue with that. The war isn't working, and we should try something different -- namely, getting the federal government out of the business of prohibition and letting the states -- and adult common sense -- decide.

This is an edited excerpt of a Los Angeles Times editorial, which was published Thursday.AMERICA's war on drugs has filled federal prisons to bursting. More than 20 percent of federal inmates are low-level and first-time drug offenders, most with no history of violence.Drug crimes should certainly be punished, but Congress has gone way overboard with its harsh and inequitable drug-sentence regimes.Now it stands in danger of doing even more damage. Federal law imposes mandatory minimum prison sentences for drug crimes, leaving no room for judicial discretion and no possibility of parole.

Concerned about three recent drug overdose deaths, including that of a 15-year-old Westminster High School student, a group of Carroll County residents has begun clamoring for stiffer penalties against juvenile drug offenders.The concern has spurred community meetings with state and local police, educators, the state's attorney's office and Junction Inc., a Westminster-based drug abuse treatment and prevention center.Activists who have formed Residents Against Drugs (RAD), a citizen organization that lobbied Wednesday in Annapolis for tougher drug laws, complain that police aren't doing enough to keep drugs out of the county and that, too often, juvenile offenders are given a slap on the wrist and allowed to return to school.

Baltimore City Circuit Judge David Mitchell sat on the panel and uttered -- on this day of media-bashing -- seeming heresy."You have to be sure the media are available to grasp what you do," Mitchell told the gathering at the symposium on sentencing sponsored by the American Judicature Society in San Diego. "The media have a responsibility to educate the public. If you are fair and honest with them, they're going to reciprocate."As if he were determined to drag symposium participants kicking and screaming back to reality, Mitchell continued to be a gadfly, chastising those who thought the main problems with sentences were judges.

Tax hike just another shakedownRumor has it that the mayor wants to raise my annual taxes by $75 or so to further subsidize his failing bureaucracy. Let me see if I've got this straight.Last month, he says he wants to shake down the tourists a little more. Now, he says that's not good enough. He also wants to shake down city residents longer and harder, too. Geez, they don't call it the government racket for nothing.I can't speak for every citizen in Baltimore, but that money has to come from somewhere.

The Anne Arundel County state's attorney has received a state grant for a $244,000 program to steer drug offenders away from jail and into treatment programs.State's Attorney Frank R. Weathersbee said the money will pay for six full-time employees to evaluate and oversee about 700 drug offenders charged in the Annapolis and Glen Burnie district courts.He said he received notice yesterday that $183,000 was approved by the governor's office of crime control and prevention. He anticipates approval of another $61,000 in county matching funds in the months ahead to help pay for the program.

Before Carroll Was DiscoveredIn 1973, my family and I moved to Eldersburg from a very nice, but busy part of Baltimore County. At night, the only thing that could be seen on our block was the light from the doorbell, unless, of course, someone had the porch light on. I had found heaven. Behind us and to the left of us were corn fields. You could hear the cows from a nearby farm where a farmer and his family had lived long before anyone ever heard of the development called Carroll Square.The fields were plowed, crops were harvested, farm machinery used the road behind us and fertilizer was spread.

Stories about the drug trade are easy hits for journalists. Colorful characters, eye-popping sums of cash, murder, cops, good guys and bad guys -- it's all there, the tried-and-true fodder of news-as-morality-play. We seem to be hooked on such stories. But how often do we get the good stuff, the stories that satisfy on a level beyond the lurid?Readers will find two this week, in the latest New Yorker (Aug. 22 and Aug. 29, a double issue) and the September Atlantic. New Yorker reporter-at-large William Finnegan goes into San Augustine County in "Deep East Texas" to show what happened after the sheriff of 40 years stepped down and crack moved in. In San Augustine, a relic of the Old South still largely segregated, Mr. Finnegan writes, "People talk about 'the sheriff' . . . as though he were an intimate, fundamental, inescapable fact of life, like oxygen."

During the recent session of the Maryland General Assembly, the House of Delegates rejected a bill that would have given courtroom judges greater sentencing leeway for first-time, nonviolent drug law offenders - including drug treatment programs rather than prison. The bill, sponsored by Del. Curtis S. Anderson of Baltimore, would have been a step in the right direction, but it was defeated for the usual reason: politicians' fear of being labeled "soft on crime." Here's why this kind of sentencing reform makes sense: For 20 years, state legislators dictated rigid prison sentences for people convicted of drug-related offenses - even if presiding judges, after learning the facts in a case, favored lesser punishments.

In a perfect world, a repeat nonviolent drug dealer who is also a drug user should receive treatment. A bill passed by the General Assembly aims to address this population but provides no additional money for treatment. That's troubling - and it's one of the reasons Gov. Martin O'Malley is threatening a veto. But the solution is not to retreat from a modest sentencing change, it's to allocate more money for drug treatment. Maryland is slowly moving in that direction. A recent study by the Justice Policy Institute, a group that advocates for drug and sentencing reforms, found that admissions to drug treatment through the state's criminal justice system increased by 28 percent from 2000 to 2004, a period that included then-Gov.

Saying the Maryland General Assembly has swung too far to the left, Republican leaders called on Gov. Martin O'Malley yesterday to veto four bills if they get to his desk, including measures that would provide in-state tuition to illegal immigrants and voting rights to felons. The House of Delegates GOP caucus, outnumbered in the legislature and now without the support of a Republican governor, sought yesterday to remind voters that there is an alternative to what they see as a liberal agenda being pursued by the Democrats.

After a fierce debate in which some lawmakers raised concerns about the effectiveness of the nation's war on drugs, the Maryland House of Delegates defeated by one vote a bill to allow some second-time drug offenders to become eligible for parole. Lawmakers opposing the measure, which failed 68-69, said it would reward drug dealers and gang members while making communities more dangerous. "They are going to get more lenient treatment under the provision of this bill," said Del Anthony J. O'Donnell, the House minority leader from Southern Maryland.

Since last week's column on the new Baltimore Truck Wash and its ambition to hire up to 60 ex-offenders, the phones have been ringing steadily again, both here on the Jobs-For-Drug-Dealers Desk (410-332-6166), and at the city's Northwest Re-Entry Center (410-523-1060). That's a good thing, and not surprising. Thousands of men in and around Baltimore have criminal records that keep them from getting jobs. It's not the only reason they relapse into selling drugs and snatching purses - some have zero ambition to go straight and be productive - but it's a major factor in a dreary cycle that presents a constant threat to public safety, ruins neighborhoods and destroys families.

The General Assembly dealt with more than just electricity rates during this week's special session. In a move that may have mixed benefits, the legislators have come up with a package of harsher requirements and penalties for sex offenders. It includes some mandatory minimum sentences that aren't good policy, and that undermine the entire proposal. Legislators tried to deal with sex offenders during the regular session, but a House-passed bill that included less-forgiving mandatory minimum sentences stalled in the Senate.

Six years ago, California voters opted to put more low-level drug offenders in treatment rather than behind bars. Recent studies show that the decision paid off, saving the state millions of dollars in reduced prison costs, with no simultaneous spike in violent crime. Though similar drug offenses are handled somewhat differently in Maryland, the larger lesson still holds - nonviolent drug users and sellers need much more treatment. California's so-called Proposition 36 mandated treatment for many nonviolent first- and second-time drug offenders instead of prison.

In an article March 16, "Let judges decide in drug cases," the statement that drug addiction costs Maryland "upward of $1 billion a year in lost wages, lost productivity and growing criminal justice costs," was an opinion of the author's and not a fact. WASHINGTON -- Every state in the country, including Maryland, must take a thorough look at returning some discretion to judges about sentencing, and reconsider whether our drug laws are effectively promoting rehabilitation, full recovery from addiction and public safety.

Low-level, nonviolent drug offenders in Maryland are often imprisoned when they would be better off in treatment, and they are often locked up for longer periods than those who commit more violent crimes. Such disparities are costly - to the state and to the offenders - and ought to be addressed more aggressively by the state's Commission on Criminal Sentencing Policy, which meets today. Created by the General Assembly in 1999, the commission establishes sentencing guidelines for serious criminal cases that are handled in the state's circuit courts where jury trials are held.

HERE'S WHAT happens in the big city: A 42- year-old man, who wasted half his life in jails and prisons because of heroin, announces that he's clean and wants out. No longer will he do dope or deal dope. He wants to leave the ranks of the thousands of men and women who for years helped suck the life out of vast stretches of Baltimore. "I just want to get back to working, and being productive," the man says. He sounds earnest. So one day he finds himself on trial for a job. It's not much of a job - busing tables in a restaurant - but it's a way to get a little income and stay busy until he can find something better, and a way to show his wife, a state employee, that he's determined to do the right thing.