Thank you.
Good afternoon. My name is Deborah Small, and I'm speaking on behalf of Break the Chains. We're a national grassroots advocacy organization committed to educating people living in communities disproportionately affected by common drug policies about the various negative effects of the war on drugs.
I wish I could say I was happy to be here today, but in all candour, it actually pains me to have to discuss the many problems inherent in Bill C-15. In my view, coming to Canada to make the case against mandatory minimum drug sentencing should be as unnecessary as travelling to a business school to explain why investors should avoid collateralized debt obligations, the derivative instruments that have nearly brought down the world's financial system. The evidence is so overwhelming and irrefutable. In many ways, mandatory minimum drug sentences are the criminal justice equivalent of credit default swaps. They offer the promise of short-term gain and enhanced security, but in fact contain elements that can significantly compromise the integrity of the criminal justice system.
For those of you who still cling to the belief that mandatory minimums have something positive to offer in the fight against drug-related crime, I'd like to share with you a few facts that should give you some pause. For many years, drug sentences in New York, as throughout the United States, have been shaped by public concerns and political pressures that have been indifferent to the need for proportionality. Factors including the persistence of drug use and abuse, the deterioration of cities, the rise of symbolic politics, racial undercurrents, fear of crime, and an unwillingness to tackle social problems, among others, have encouraged politicians and public officials to embrace inordinately tough sentences for drug felonies.
As you heard earlier, in 1973, the state that I'm from, New York, led the country in enacting mandatory sentences as a response to drug addiction. What's interesting is that the governor who proposed the Rockefeller drug laws was in fact originally a champion of drug treatment and rehabilitation as a first response to drug abuse, but he became frustrated by the high relapse rates attached with addiction and the fact that it wasn't as easy to address as he thought it would be. So in 1973 he rejected his previous support for treatment and advocated what became known as the toughest drug laws in the country.
The Rockefeller drug laws are very close in their context to the laws we're considering today. They required that people, including first-time offenders, be given long prison sentences based on the weight of the drugs involved rather than the specific circumstances of the case. It also required that anyone who was convicted of a felony, in this case a drug felony, within 10 years of a previous one had to be put in prison for a specific period of time. In New York, possessing as little as half a gram of cocaine or heroin could trigger a minimum sentence of a year.
This second felony drug law, or second felony offender law, was the one that ultimately led to the massive increase in the prison population that we saw in New York State. There was a steady increase in the number of people who were incarcerated, so much so that the percentage of the state's drug offenders went from 11% in 1980 to more than 44% by 1993. Just like the laws you're looking at today, the Rockefeller drug laws came down hard on people who were not kingpins, even though they were put forth as being directed at kingpins. There was a 1993 case in which an appeals court reviewed the sentence of a man named Jesus Portilla, who was an asbestos remover with a wife and small child. He was a first-time offender and received a sentence of eight and a half to 25 years for a $30 cocaine sale under the Rockefeller laws.
In 1997, former Governor Pataki felt compelled to grant clemency to Angela Thompson. She was also a first-time offender and had been sentenced to 15 years because she had been coerced by a family member to sell drugs to an undercover cop. In fact, one of the many unintended consequences of the Rockefeller drug laws was that it provided an incentive for people in the drug trade to actively recruit young people as runners and couriers.
As a native New Yorker—I've lived in New York pretty much my whole life—I got to see the impact of the drug laws. While drug problems were endemic in poor communities from the mid-1950s, it wasn't until the Rockefeller laws passed that you had the active involvement of many young people in the drug trade, because they weren't subject to the same length of sentences as their adult counterparts.
Unfortunately, legislators did not learn from New York's policy mistake. Instead, it was emulated on a federal level. In 1986, Congress enacted federal mandatory minimum sentences for drug offences, with offences involving crack cocaine being singled out for the harshest punishment. Under our federal law, the sale or possession of five grams of crack is enough to trigger a five-year mandatory prison sentence.
I think it's important to note that while all studies show that drug use is pretty much endemic across every population and socio-economic group, the history in the U.S. has been that drug law enforcement has disproportionately impacted poor people. In New York, the vast majority of drug offenders sentenced to prison are non-violent minor drug dealers, people only marginally involved in drug transactions. They are people involved in $20 sales on the streets, one-time couriers buying drugs for a small fee, and addicts who are looking to finance their own habits.
These are the people we've been incarcerating for long periods of time. Even a short sentence of two years can be a disproportionately severe sentence for a person who has committed only a minor offence, and it can have a dramatically desperate impact on their lives.
I think it's also important to point out that mandatory minimums represent a zero-sum expenditure for taxpayers. They substantially increase criminal justice expenditures, particularly with respect to incarceration, without giving any commensurate gain in reducing drug-related crime, drug abuse, or drug availability. According to a 1997 RAND study, mandatory minimums are the least cost-effective means of reducing drug use and sales.
I think it's important to note that one of the effects in New York of enacting the Rockefeller laws is that it forced the state to reallocate money in ways that were really very detrimental. We saw a dollar-for-dollar trade-off in increased expenditures for prisons versus higher education. That sent a message to young people, particularly young people of colour, that the state would actually prefer to invest in their incarceration rather than their education.
At a certain point, two-thirds of the people being incarcerated for drug offences came from seven neighbourhoods in New York City. I don't think it should be surprising for people to hear that those were the neighbourhoods that had the highest level of unemployment and the majority of failing schools, where the people were suffering from poor housing and had poor health outcomes.
So to me, one of the major problems with these kinds of laws is that instead of using the law to provide protection to those people to whom life has already dealt an unfair hand, we're actually using it to punish them more, and to have them become the scapegoats for our desire to pretend that we're being tough on drugs.
There's a final point I want to make, because I read a lot of the transcripts in which people felt that this was something that would be popular with the public and that one of the reasons for supporting these policies was the desire to appear tough on crime. Well, many of the people who were conservative criminologists in the United States, and who originally supported tough approaches, have since come out against mandatory minimums.
People like John J. Dilulio Jr., a noted criminologist who coined the phrase “super-predator”, came out in 1999 and said that these laws were totally ineffective and that all we were doing was replacing one drug dealer with another and ruining people's lives for no real reason. Joseph Anthony Califano, president of the Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse, said that “mandatory minimum sentences are a round-trip ticket back to jail and a life of crime”.
Even former Attorney General Ed Meese, under Ronald Reagan, said that he thought mandatory minimums for drug offenders needed to be reviewed, that you actually had to look at who was being incarcerated and what gain did and did not come from it.
The final point that I think it's important to make is that the public no longer really supports this. We've done survey after survey in the last few years to show that more than 50% of the public actually believes that locking up people for minor drug offences should be the last thing we do, not the first response.
So from my point of view, I can't understand why Canada, given the wide amount of evidence there is about the failure and the ineffectiveness of mandatory minimum sentences, would even be considering enacting them when there are so many better things you can do by increasing community-based treatment, really using the kinds of things that have been shown to work, having realistic and effective drug education, and developing a system that really focuses on helping people instead of punishing them.
Thank you.