Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee.
I'm Eric Sterling. In 1986 I was in the situation you are in, considering legislation to adopt mandatory minimum sentences being considered by the House of Representatives in the U.S. Congress.
I commend you for what you're doing, which is to make a very careful examination of the issue, because what we did in 1986 was done in a great deal of haste. One of our collegiate basketball stars died in June. A few weeks later the Speaker of the House of Representatives, from Boston, Tip O'Neill, called the Democrats together to organize a political response to that tragic death, and he wanted legislation reported within one month.
We were working on money laundering and other issues, and in the last three days before the August recess the idea of mandatory minimums was developed. It came out of my word processor, and it is probably the greatest mistake of my entire career of over 30 years in the practice of law.
So I commend what you're doing. I also commend your legislation. The mandatory minimums that you're proposing--periods such as one year, two years, or three years--are nothing like the periods in the American legislation. Our mandatory minimums are five years, ten years, fifteen years, and twenty years, depending upon the circumstances.
I'll note that your mandatory minimums are for offences that, as I understand it, carry terms of imprisonment of up to life, and there's a way in which the message you're sending seems to be confusing and inconsistent. If these are circumstances in which a judge might impose a sentence of up to life imprisonment, then a mandatory minimum sentence of only a year or two seems to me, in some sense, inconsistent and confusing to judges.
If you are considering the American experience, I'll simply note a few things. Our experience has been ineffective. An earlier witness spoke today about the ineffectiveness of New York's mandatory minimums. The American mandatory minimums have been completely ineffective in reducing the availability of drugs to our youth. Studies that have been done have shown that the perception of the ready availability of drugs to our youth has changed very little, if at all.
Since 1986 the prices that are charged by the drug traffickers have gone down dramatically. I'll take as an example the retail price of heroin. In 1986 it was $1,352 U.S. per gram. The most recent data from the DEA in 2003 was that it was down to $362, so a decline of almost 75%, from $1,352 down to $362. At the same time, the purity at the retail level increased from an average of 24% to an average of 32% in 2003. And those trends have gotten worse, according to things I've heard from DEA more recently.
The same thing is true with cocaine. In 1986 the price of a gram of pure cocaine was a little less than $300. By 2003 it was a little more than $100, and the purity had gone from 56% on average to 70% on average. This is data from the DEA, compiled by our White House drug czar's office.
This is not evidence of any kind of success.
Our federal prison population has grown from 36,000 prisoners in 1986 to 203,000 prisoners as of the end of March--a very dramatic increase--and over 100,000 of those prisoners are there only on drug charges. So that's a tremendous increase in our prison capacity.
Of course, a lot of what we're trying to do has symbolic character. I suspect your committee has heard about the message you might be sending to youth, that we're taking the problem very seriously, the message you want to send to drug traffickers and prospective criminals. Let me suggest the average drug trafficker is not paying any attention to what you're saying. They don't read the records of your debates. They in fact probably do not know the law. They barely pay attention to the newspapers or watch the news of your debate on television. They're not getting the message and they really don't care.
They're not long-term planners. They're not like men and women who are thinking about a career in politics, who look five, ten, fifteen, twenty years down the road for what kind of a career they can have, from city council to provincial legislature to Parliament in Ottawa. These are people who operate on the short term. They're highly impulsive, and they're not making the kinds of calculations you might make and that would be reasonable to make. The message you're intending is to an audience that is not paying attention and doesn't know how to even comprehend the message you think you're sending.
I encourage you to look very carefully at what these measures are going to cost, and to think very hard about whether or not they will be effective.
I yield the balance of my time and I anticipate your questions at the conclusion of all the statements. Thank you very much.