President Obama’s use of clemency powers to commute the long-term prison sentences of eight non-violent drug offenders is a courageous acknowledgment of the need for urgent reforms in the US criminal justice system. In a public statement released shortly after the commutations, which were accompanied by pardons for 13 other drug-related offences, the president noted that the blanket application of federally mandated minimum sentences is now “recognized as unjust” and that it had repeatedly forced judges to impose draconian sentences on offenders who had remained in prison long after they would – under current law – have finished serving their time and repaying their debt to society. (During his presidency, Obama has granted only one of the more than 8,700 commutation requests from federal inmates.)
Clarence Aaron, one of the eight prisoners whose sentences were commuted, is a good example of how the impractical severity of America’s drug laws paved the road to its crisis of mass incarceration. Aaron was sentenced to three life terms for facilitating an introduction to a known drug dealer. Although he had no prior offences and did not procure, sell or distribute the drugs, the legal system forced a federal judge to treat him as though he had.
The US currently houses a quarter of the world’s entire prison population and the costs of maintaining a system that imprisons its citizens so readily are predictably massive. The Department of Justice’s recently published annual review describes overcrowding as an “increasingly critical threat” to the system’s ability to function and notes that during the last 12 years the number of inmates has increased from 157,000 to almost 220,000, with pre-trial costs rising from $617 million to $1.5 billion. During the same time the Bureau of Prisons’ budget has grown from $4.3 billion to $6.4 billion. No wonder, then, that Attorney General Eric Holder has promised to implement “sweeping systemic changes” in a “Smart on Crime” initiative.
Reforms to criminal justice, in any country, do not occur in a political vacuum. For many years human rights groups have criticized the disparity in sentencing for offences related to crack cocaine – which tend to affect street-level drug dealers – and those for offences related to powdered cocaine – likelier to be committed by wealthy people with access to good lawyers. One obvious result of the imbalance is that America has filled its prisons with the poor and the powerless while letting well-heeled drug users go free. Systemic changes of the kind that Eric Holder has promised will mean little unless they explicitly tackle the attitudes that gave rise to these discrepancies in the first place.
What can Guyana learn from the US response to these problems? We might revisit the comparably severe, and impractical, Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (Control) Act adopted – under US pressure – in 1988. This introduced minimum sentences that also caused terrible overcrowding in our prisons. This has destroyed the lives of hundreds of young people and has often made first offenders far likelier to pursue a life of crime after they were forced to spend longer periods in the company of more seasoned criminals. We might also take heed of the growing consensus that the ill-conceived US-led War on Drugs has comprehensively failed to prevent the growth of narcotrafficking throughout the Americas. Furthermore, the criminal violence associated with several quasi-military solutions to the problem has produced widespread corruption and terrible bloodshed in places like Colombia and Mexico.
Last year the New York Times reported that the amount of money state governments in the US now spend on prisons is growing faster than any other budget item. In a striking statistic, the Times noted that California currently spends more on its prisons than it does on higher education (30 years ago the ratio used to be 3:1 the other way). This may be the most important issue in considering the need to revisit over-ambitious anti-crime initiatives. Shouldn’t we, too, be asking whether the money that we currently spend maintaining a system of harsh laws and overcrowded prisons would not be better used on education, healthcare, or any number of other priorities?
