DRUG SENTENCES UNDER SCRUTINY

Forum Addresses Prison Overcrowding

Describing the war on drugs as "an utter failure, a total failure," a
former N.C. Supreme Court chief justice said Monday that the state
should consider decriminalizing drug offenses to reduce the need for
additional prisons.

"What if we decriminalized drugs?" Burley B. Mitchell Jr. asked at a
forum on prisons in downtown Raleigh. "If you knock out all the
profits, then there would be no more Colombian cartel. There would be
no more Mexican cartel. They would be broken."

Drug offenses should be treated as a medical problem, he added.

"God, what could we do with the money we spend on sending people to
jail?" Mitchell said.

Mitchell, who was chief justice from 1995 through 1999, was one of
three panel members for "Getting Smart on Crime: Facing North
Carolina's Prison Crisis," at the Exploris Museum.

The forum was co-hosted by N.C. Policy Watch, an organization with
the goal of changing the way government officials debate issues, and
Families Against Mandatory Minimums, a national nonprofit that
challenges sentencing laws. About 50 community activists, legislators
and others attended the event, which focused on the state's prison
bed crisis and the disproportionate numbers of blacks in prison.

A second panelist, Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing
Project, a criminal justice research and advocacy nonprofit in
Washington, noted that the United States has 2 million people behind
bars on any given day. Nationally, more than half of all federal
prisoners are in for drug offenses.

"The United States is the world leader in the numbers of people it
locks up," Mauer said. "We have just replaced Russia."

The prison population has been rising exponentially since the 1970s.
Mauer attributed the growth to changes in criminal justice policy
instead of rising crime. Those polices include the 1980s war on
drugs, and get-tough policies in the 1990s such as three-strike
sentencing and mandatory minimums.

"We are sending more people to prison, and we are keeping them there
for a longer period of time," Mauer said.

Projections by the N.C. Sentencing Commission indicate that at
current incarceration rates, the state will need 10,000 new prisoner
beds by 2010.

Forum organizers noted that blacks make up about 59 percent of the
state's total prison population and 72 percent of people convicted as
habitual offenders.

"The toll that the criminal justice system is having on the black
community across the state and nation is unforgivable," said panelist
Dan Blue, a former speaker of the N.C. House. Blue said violent
offenders should be treated more severely, along with white-collar
criminals who wreak substantial economic damage.