Issue 350
October 21, 2005
v Let those dopers be by Norm Stamper, Los Angeles Times
v Report Finds U.N. Isnt Moving to End Sex Abuse by Peacekeepers by Warren Hoge, The New York Times
v Prisons can be cages or schools by Joan Petersilia, Los Angeles Times
v Doctor Believes N. Va. Man Was Tortured by Jerry Markon, The Washington Post
v Gunning for the Poor by Harold Meyerson, The Washington Post
Let
those dopers be
A former
police chief wants to end a losing war by legalizing pot, coke, meth and other
drugs
By Norm
Stamper
Norm Stamper is the former chief of the Seattle Police Department.
He is the author of "Breaking Rank: A Top Cop's Exposι of the Dark Side of
American Policing" (Nation Books, 2005).
SOMETIMES
PEOPLE in law enforcement will hear it whispered that I'm a former cop
who favors
decriminalization of marijuana laws, and they'll approach me the way they might
a traitor or snitch. So let me set the record straight.
Yes, I was a
cop for 34 years, the last six of which I spent as chief of Seattle's police
department.
But no, I
don't favor decriminalization. I favor legalization, and not just of pot but of
all drugs, including heroin, cocaine, meth, psychotropics, mushrooms and LSD.
Decriminalization,
as my colleagues in the drug reform movement hasten to inform me, takes the
crime out of using drugs but continues to classify possession and use as a
public offense, punishable by fines.
I've never
understood why adults shouldn't enjoy the same right to use verboten drugs as
they have to suck on a Marlboro or knock back a scotch and water.
Prohibition
of alcohol fell flat on its face. The prohibition of other drugs rests on an
equally wobbly foundation. Not until we choose to frame responsible drug use
not an oxymoron in my dictionary as a civil liberty will we be able to
recognize the abuse of drugs, including alcohol, for what it is: a medical, not
a criminal, matter.
As a cop, I
bore witness to the multiple lunacies of the "war on drugs." Lasting
far longer than any other of our national conflicts, the drug war has been
prosecuted with equal vigor by Republican and Democratic administrations, with
one president after another Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush
delivering sanctimonious sermons, squandering vast sums of taxpayer money and
cheerleading law enforcers from the safety of the sidelines.
It's not a
stretch to conclude that our draconian approach to drug use is the most
injurious domestic policy since slavery. Want to cut back on prison
overcrowding and save a bundle on the construction of new facilities? Open the
doors, let the nonviolent drug offenders go. The huge increases in federal and
state prison populations during the 1980s and '90s (from 139 per 100,000
residents in 1980 to 482 per 100,000 in 2003) were mainly for drug convictions.
In 1980, 580,900 Americans were arrested on drug charges. By 2003, that figure
had ballooned to 1,678,200. We're making more arrests for drug offenses than
for murder, manslaughter, forcible rape and aggravated assault combined. Feel
safer?
I've
witnessed the devastating effects of open-air drug markets in residential
neighborhoods: children recruited as runners, mules and lookouts; drug dealers
and innocent citizens shot dead in firefights between rival traffickers bent on
protecting or expanding their markets; dedicated narcotics officers tortured
and killed in the line of duty; prisons filled with nonviolent drug offenders;
and drug-related foreign policies that foster political instability, wreak
health and environmental disasters, and make life even tougher for indigenous
subsistence farmers in places such as Latin America and Afghanistan. All
because we like our drugs and can't have them without breaking the law.
As an
illicit commodity, drugs cost and generate extravagant sums of (laundered,
untaxed) money, a powerful magnet for character-challenged police officers.
Although
small in numbers of offenders, there isn't a major police force the Los
Angeles Police Department included that has escaped the problem: cops, sworn
to uphold the law, seizing and converting drugs to their own use, planting dope
on suspects, robbing and extorting pushers, taking up dealing themselves,
intimidating or murdering witnesses.
In declaring
a war on drugs, we've declared war on our fellow citizens. War requires
"hostiles" enemies we can demonize, fear and loathe. This
unfortunate categorization of millions of our citizens justifies treating them
as dope fiends, evil-doers, less than human. That grants political license to
ban the exchange or purchase of clean needles or to withhold methadone from
heroin addicts motivated to kick the addiction.
President
Bush has even said no to medical marijuana. Why would he want to
"coddle" the enemy? Even if the enemy is a suffering AIDS or cancer
patient for whom marijuana promises palliative, if not therapeutic, powers.
As a nation,
we're long overdue for a soul-searching, coldly analytical look at both the
"drug scene" and the drug war. Such candor would reveal the futility
of our current policies, exposing the embarrassingly meager return on our
massive enforcement investment (about $69 billion a year, according to Jack
Cole, founder and executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition).
How would
"regulated legalization" work? It would: 1) Permit private companies
to compete for licenses to cultivate, harvest, manufacture, package and peddle
drugs.
2) Create a
new federal regulatory agency (with no apologies to libertarians or paleo-conservatives).
3) Set and
enforce standards of sanitation, potency and purity.
4) Ban
advertising.
5) Impose
(with congressional approval) taxes, fees and fines to be used for drug-abuse
prevention and treatment and to cover the costs of administering the new
regulatory agency.
6) Police
the industry much as alcoholic beverage control agencies keep a watch on bars
and liquor stores at the state level. Such reforms would in no way excuse drug
users who commit crimes: driving while impaired, providing drugs to minors,
stealing an iPod or a Lexus, assaulting one's spouse, abusing one's child. The
message is simple. Get loaded, commit a crime, do the time.
These
reforms would yield major reductions in a host of predatory street crimes, a
disproportionate number of which are committed by users who resort to stealing
in order to support their habit or addiction.
Regulated
legalization would soon dry up most stockpiles of currently illicit drugs
substances of uneven, often questionable quality (including "bunk,"
i.e., fakes such as oregano, gypsum, baking powder or even poisons passed off
as the genuine article). It would extract from today's drug dealing the obscene
profits that attract the needy and the greedy and fuel armed violence. And it
would put most of those certifiably frightening crystal meth labs out of
business once and for all.
Combined
with treatment, education and other public health programs for drug abusers,
regulated legalization would make your city or town an infinitely healthier
place to live and raise a family.
It would
make being a cop a much safer occupation, and it would lead to greater police
accountability and improved morale and job satisfaction.
But wouldn't
regulated legalization lead to more users and, more to the point, drug abusers?
Probably, though no one knows for sure our leaders are too timid even to
broach the subject in polite circles, much less to experiment with new policy
models. My own prediction? We'd see modest increases in use, negligible
increases in abuse.
The demand
for illicit drugs is as strong as the nation's thirst for bootleg booze during
Prohibition. It's a demand that simply will not dwindle or dry up. Whether to
find God, heighten sexual arousal, relieve physical pain, drown one's sorrows
or simply feel good, people throughout the millenniums have turned to mood- and
mind-altering substances.
They're not
about to stop, no matter what their government says or does. It's time to
accept drug use as a right of adult Americans, treat drug abuse as a public
health problem and end the madness of an unwinnable war.
* * * * *
Report
Finds U.N. Isn't Moving to End Sex Abuse by Peacekeepers
By WARREN
HOGE
UNITED
NATIONS, Oct. 18 - The United Nations has developed procedures to curb sexual
abuse by peacekeepers, but the measures are not being put into force because of
a deep-seated culture of tolerating sexual exploitation, an independent review
reported Tuesday.
"A
'boys will be boys' attitude in peacekeeping missions breeds tolerance for
exploiting and abusing local women," said the report, by Refugees
International, a Washington-based advocacy group. "This attitude is slowly
changing, but the U.N. must go beyond strong rhetoric and ensure that the
resources needed to change this culture are available."
The 32-page
document provided an update on an attention-getting report in March by Prince
Zeid Raad al-Hussein, Jordan's ambassador to the United Nations. His report was
prompted by evidence that peacekeepers and civilian staff members had had sex
with women and girls in Congo in exchange for food and money, and in some cases
had committed rape.
Prince Zeid,
a former military officer and civilian peacekeeper in Bosnia, said in a
briefing on Tuesday that even though his report had addressed a situation that
undermined the credibility of the United Nations, influential member states
greeted it with "utter silence."
"The
entire responsibility for this mess is with the member states," he said,
adding that meetings he had scheduled after his report was published were only
sparsely attended.
Sarah
Martin, the author of the new report, said she had visited peacekeeping
missions in Haiti and Liberia and had found that a "wall of silence"
kept sexual abuse cases from being investigated. Rapes were often belittled as
simple acts of prostitution. "They'd say, 'Why should we ruin someone's
otherwise illustrious career over an act with a prostitute,' " she said in
the briefing.
She said
Liberians had complained to her about some peacekeepers' conduct with the
comment, "This behavior would not be accepted in the home country of these
soldiers; why are these soldiers playing around with our children?"
Ms. Martin
said guidelines adopted at headquarters were not being taken seriously in the
field, adding: "Until there is a better understanding of the zero-contact
rule, peacekeepers will continue to think of it as a rule that makes no sense.
Fear of punishment is not enough to ensure compliance."
Among the
changes called for were empowering local women, conducting public information
campaigns to combat the "masculine culture that has developed,"
giving more importance to the so-called gender advisers who are now required on
missions, giving victims access to the United Nations complaint system and
guaranteeing that complainants are protected.
As of
September, only 10 of the 17 peacekeeping missions had a fulltime gender
advisory position, the report said. According to United Nations figures, the 17
missions involve 80,000 people.
Anna Shotton
of the United Nations peacekeeping department said that while "tremendous
progress has been made over the past year to drive home the U.N.'s message of
zero tolerance and zero impunity," the message had still not taken hold.
She said that
over the past 20 months, investigations had been completed on 221 accused
peacekeepers, resulting in the firing of 10 civilian employees and the
repatriation of 88 military men, including 6 commanders.
Asked how
that compared with previous periods, she said, "You had the occasional
repatriation of uniformed personnel, but it was very rare."
* * * * *
Prisons
can be cages or schools
By Joan
Petersilia
JOAN PETERSILIA, a professor of criminology, law and society at UC
Irvine, is the author of "When Prisoners Come Home: Parole and Prisoner
Reentry." She is a visiting professor of law at Stanford Law
CALIFORNIA'S
corrections leaders have again embraced rehabilitation, a shift from the 1980s,
when prisons backed away from that goal and cut their education, work training
and anti-drug abuse programs. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger supports the reforms.
"Corrections should correct," he has said repeatedly. Reflecting the
state's new priorities, the Youth and Adult Correctional Agency has been renamed
the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
California's
prison population has swelled to more than 165,000 inmates, and the vast
majority of them have serious social, physical and mental health problems. They
will spend, on average, five months in jail, 29 months in prison and 19 months
on parole 4.4 years under correctional supervision.
Yet during
these months, nearly 20% of California inmates do not participate in any
program that addresses the problems that caused their criminal conduct. The vast
majority are simply given a work assignment, which counts as a program.
Today, just
one-third of prisoners released received vocational or educational training
while in prison. Despite the fact that 75% of inmates have alcohol or drug
problems, just 25% participated in a substance-abuse program. Even when they do
take part, inmates' treatment programs consist mostly of self-help groups
rather than the intensive therapy found to be most effective.
It's not
that inmates don't wish to join these programs. There are long waiting lists
for virtually all education, treatment and work programs. And some are quite
promising, among them the Mental Health Continuum for inmates with
psychological illnesses, the Transitional Case Management program for inmates
with HIV/AIDS and the Prison Industry Authority, which provides job training.
But the growth of the prison population has outstripped these and other
programs' capacity.
When
prisoners are unprepared for reentry into society, they tend to return to criminal
behavior. About 70% of all California parolees end up back in prison within 18
months of their release a failure rate more than twice the national average.
Such high recidivism is a huge factor in the cost of running the state's
$7.3-billion correctional system to say nothing of the harm done to new crime
victims.
Recidivism
will remain unacceptably high unless we invest more in prison education, job
training and substance-abuse programs. But let's not be naive. Rehab programs
are not for every inmate, and money shouldn't be wasted on prisoners who lack
the motivation to change. But let's also not be foolish. Inmates who wish to
live crime-free when they return home should have every opportunity in prison
to change.
There is
ample evidence that treatment programs can reduce recidivism. Group therapy for
drug addicts, substance-abuse programs with follow-up care, intensive
psychotherapy for sex offenders, basic and vocational education and prison
industries for the general population each of these programs reduces the
recidivism rate of participants by 8% to 15%.
Modest
though these reductions are, they pay for themselves by reducing future
law-enforcement costs. Prisoners who take vocational education, for example,
are 15% less likely to return to crime when released. The cost: about $2,000 a
prisoner per year. Analysts estimate that, on average, this translates down the
line into $12,000 per prisoner in saved criminal-justice costs.
Prison
leaders in California are adding and improving work-training programs. In May,
the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation announced it will
work with the National Center for Construction Education and Research, which
will hire 70 vocational instructors to train and certify more than 1,800
prisoners a year to work in the building-trades industry.
Inmates who
go through comprehensive halfway houses and reentry centers have lower
recidivism rates than those released directly to the community. California
closed most of its halfway houses, and fewer than 1,000 of the 117,000
prisoners released last year spent any time in one. In Ohio and New Jersey, for
instance, all serious prisoners return home through halfway houses. These
states' recidivism rates are also much lower than California's.
Prison
administrators are partnering with the newly established Center for
Evidence-Based Corrections at UC Irvine to review rehabilitation, parole and
reentry programs for effectiveness. It's no longer justifiable to say that
"nothing works." There is good scientific evidence that prison and
parole programs can reduce recidivism. It's not easy. It's not inexpensive. But
it's possible.
Politicians
who say rehabilitation programs are "soft on crime" are shortsighted.
No one is more dangerous than a criminal who has no incentive to straighten
himself or herself out while in prison and who returns to society without a
plan. As ironic as it sounds, it is in the interest of public safety to support
rehabilitation programs. Good rehabilitation and reentry programs translate
into going home to stay and living as law-abiding citizens. That benefits all
Californians.
* * * * *
Doctor
Believes N.Va. Man Was Tortured
By Jerry
Markon
Washington
Post Staff Writer
An American
student charged in an al Qaeda plot to kill President Bush said his Saudi
captors whipped him on the back, punched him in the stomach and kicked him,
according to a doctor who examined the student and testified yesterday before
the judge who must decide if the student was tortured.
Ahmed Omar
Abu Ali also said he was shackled with his arms above his head for more than
seven hours after initially refusing to cooperate with FBI agents who traveled
to Saudi Arabia to interrogate him in 2003, according to the doctor, Allen
Keller. Keller, who is program director of the Bellevue/NYU Program for
Survivors of Torture in New York, examined Abu Ali in April at the request of
his attorneys.
"He
told me it was excruciatingly painful,'' Keller testified at a hearing in U.S.
District Court in Alexandria. He said he believes the alleged mistreatment
constituted torture and cited as evidence scars consistent with whipping that
he said he observed on Abu Ali's back.
The
testimony means that a judge will have to evaluate the opinions of clashing experts
on a key issue in the high-profile case. Attorneys for Abu Ali, 24, of Falls
Church say that he was tortured in Saudi custody and that statements that form
the crux of the government's case should be thrown out because they were
obtained under duress.
The hearing,
which started last week and runs through tomorrow, is to determine whether Abu
Ali's statements to Saudi interrogators will be admitted into evidence.
Prosecutors
deny that Abu Ali was tortured, and they sought to discredit Keller's testimony
yesterday by questioning his objectivity and saying he has a tendency to always
believe people who say they were tortured. Asked by Assistant U.S. Attorney
David Laufman how many alleged torture victims he has examined, Keller said
about 500.
"How many
of those 500 or so did you find to be malingering?'' Laufman asked.
"Very
few,'' Keller replied.
Prosecutors
presented their own expert earlier yesterday, Robert Katz, a dermatologist. He
testified that four marks he saw on a photo of Abu Ali's back were unlikely to
have been caused by whipping. "They show no evidence of scarring,'' said
Katz, an expert on skin trauma. "They are limited to the upper back.''
On Monday, a
U.S. government doctor who examined Abu Ali in February, when he was flown back
from Saudi Arabia to face terrorism charges, testified that he could not
conclude that the marks on Abu Ali's back came from physical abuse. He said
they could also be the result of old scarring or could have been
self-inflicted.
Abu Ali is
charged with conspiracy to assassinate President Bush and other terrorism
counts in connection with the alleged al Qaeda plot, which prosecutors say also
envisioned a Sept. 11-style attack in the United States. Prosecutors say that
Abu Ali has admitted his participation and that he planned to shoot the president
or blow him up with a car bomb. He admitted that the plan never got past the
idea stage, prosecutors have said in court papers.
It is
unclear when U.S. District Judge Gerald Bruce Lee will rule on the torture question.
The case is scheduled to go to trial next week.
* * * * *
Gunning
for the Poor
By Harold
Meyerson
Congress is
back in session, and it's gunning for the American poor.
A revolt of
House conservatives has persuaded that body's Republican leadership to offset
the increased federal spending going to rebuild the Hurricane Katrina-devastated
Gulf Coast by reductions in Medicaid, food stamps and other programs for the
indigent. If things go according to plan, this week the House will begin to cut
$50 billion from those efforts.
The emerging
Republican response to Katrina, apparently, is to comfort the drenched poor and
afflict the dry.
For a moment
last week, it looked as though the Republicans were going to enact across-the-board
spending cuts.
That,
however, would have meant less money for defense contractors and the highway
industry and other contributors to congressional Republicans' campaigns. GOP committee
chairmen made that point so forcefully that the idea was scrapped.
The beauty
of taking the cuts out of Medicaid and student loan programs, by happy
contrast, is that it doesn't reduce the flow of funds to the Republican campaign
committees by a single dime.
Even before
the right-wing House leadership capitulated to the even further right-wing
House rank-and-file, the government's response to Katrina already appeared to
be driven more by laissez-faire ideology than by need or common sense. The
administration has opposed efforts by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles
Grassley to extend Medicaid coverage to those Katrina survivors who lost their
jobs and health insurance in the flood. And by suspending the requirements of
the Davis-Bacon Act that construction workers on federally funded reconstruction
efforts be paid the prevailing wage, President Bush has ensured that much of
that work will be done by illegal immigrants, as one recent New York Times
report on the Mexican workers rebuilding Gulfport, Miss., made
abundantly
clear. (In their ongoing contest of core values, the Republicans are still more
anti-labor than anti-immigrant.) More broadly, the administration increasingly
acts as if the reconstruction of the Gulf Coast will sprout from the bottom up.
But
businesses can't really invest in the region absent assurances that the infrastructure
will be rebuilt, that public services will be restored, that taxpayers will be
returning to live and work there. That's why Louisiana Republican Rep. Richard
Baker has proposed that the federal government create a Louisiana Recovery
Corporation to coordinate these massive tasks. But the administration has not
only paid little heed to Baker's proposal, it has failed to create any
coordinating body of its own.
What we have
here is an ideologically driven dereliction of duty. If the Bush White House
had been put in charge of the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer and Teller would
still be puttering around in the New Mexico desert today.
And it gets
worse. The same Republican zealots who demand fiscal responsibility by cutting
$50 billion for the indigent sick are now also demanding a new $70 billion in
tax cuts, including the permanent repeal of the estate tax, that would chiefly
benefit the rich. For a few brief weeks after Katrina, Republicans actually
suspended their advocacy of tax cuts, but this onset of sanity came to a
shuddering halt once the cameras were removed from the Superdome.
Not that it
seems to bother them in the least, but the Republicans' post-Katrina priorities
and those of the American public couldn't be more diametrically opposed.
Earlier this month, Peter Hart's polling firm asked respondents if they believed
cutting Medicaid and like programs by $35 billion (the GOP's targeted cut had
not yet risen to $50 billion) and cutting taxes by $70 billion was the right or
wrong priority. By a margin of 67 percent to 24 percent, the respondents said
it was wrong. And in a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll last week, 48 percent
of those questioned said they wanted the Democrats to control
the next
Congress, while just 39 percent favored the Republicans.
You'd think
these figures would give the Republicans pause. Instead, they increasingly act
as though they were immune to the laws of political gravity. Republicans have
grown so accustomed to winning elections by gerrymandering districts,
activating their faithful and attacking Democrats over trumped-up issues that
they believe they can survive even major shifts in public sentiment.
Not all
congressional Republicans can afford to be so cavalier about public opinion, of
course. A few moderates have expressed misgivings about the cutbacks. Last
week, the primary group that had mobilized the grass-roots opposition to Social
Security privatization announced that it had reconstituted itself as the
Emergency Campaign for America's Priorities, and it identified 13 such
moderates whom it will pressure to oppose the cuts. In the main, though, the
Republican revolution proceeds on its march to extremes, undaunted, in the manner
of most ideological revolutions, by the constraints of popular opinion and
actual consequence.
* * * * *