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1993-02-08
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02/08/1993 BOSTON (AP) -- The criminal justice system is "on a
fast track to collapse" by emphasizing drug arrests while paying
less attention to violent crime, an American Bar Association panel
says.
"Unless we do something now ... we are going to have a criminal
justice system that is crushed under the caseload of criminal cases
without any appreciable decrease in crime," said Neal Sonnett,
chairman of the ABA's criminal justice section.
The organization released a report Sunday during the ABA's
midwinter meeting that said the anti-drug campaign is resulting in
sharply increased arrests and imprisonment of minorities.
"We have a criminal justice system in this country that is on a
fast track to collapse" because of the number of drug cases that are
pushing back civil cases on court calendars, Sonnett said.
Andrew L. Sonner, the chief prosecutor in Montgomery County, Md.,
said he fears communities will continue cutting back on schools and
libraries to pay for more jails and prisons to hold the increasing
number of inmates.
But schools and libraries "have more to do with the prevention of
crime than locking people up for (long) terms," Sonner said.
The ABA group analyzed a variety of government statistics for
federal and state law enforcement, courts and prisons.
According to the report, arrests for drug offenses rose 24
percent from 1985 to 1991 although household surveys during the same
period showed that the share of the population using drugs dropped
from 12 percent to 6 percent.
The number of adults in prison for drug offenses rose by 327
percent from 1986 to 1991, while the number imprisoned for all
crimes rose by 50 percent and the number for violent crimes rose by
41 percent.
The 346,000 adults incarcerated for violent crimes in 1991 still
was more than double the 165,000 imprisoned for drug crimes, but
drug offenders make up a growing share of the nationwide prison
population.
Spending on law enforcement has become more heavily weighted
toward prisons than police, the report said. Too often, Sonner said,
violent criminals must be released from prison early to make room
for drug offenders serving long mandatory sentences.
The ABA has long opposed the mandatory sentences required by federal law
mainly for drug offenses. Before Congress acted in recent years to impose
mandatory terms, federal judges had wider discretion to set sentences for such
crimes.
Sonnett said it would be wrong to attribute the decline in drug
use to the increasing arrests and imprisonments. Instead, he said,
public education has made drug use less socially acceptable.
Alfred Blumstein, dean of public policy and management at
Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, said in an interview that
statistics have shown that cocaine use peaked in 1982 and began
dropping.
"The crackdown on drugs is really a post-1985 phenomenon," he
said. "It's tough to attribute the decline very much to the war on
drugs."