Drop the Rock

The nation's harshest drug laws -- a legacy of New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller -- are now entering their 30th year.

Attempts at reforming New York State drug laws drags on while 19,000 people languish in prison. The law was intended to target big-time dealers -- and some of the incarcerated are indeed violent offenders. But up to 90 percent of them, estimates Rev. John H. Cole of the United Methodist church, are addicted, low-level street dealers, guilty only of selling small amounts of heroin or cocaine or crack.

And 94 percent of them are Latino or black -- though they use drugs at the same rate as whites. Commit a second offense, and almost any speck of drugs leads to hard time. Warehousing them helps provide some 30,000 jobs, mostly in depressed upstate New York at a cost of $700 million a year -- this in a state facing a more than $1 billion budget deficit.

Meanwhile, the state's leaders call for reform and blame others for a stalemate that has existed since at least early 2001, when New York's Republican Governor, George Pataki, proposed a species of reform.

Seeking to stifle the impact of demonstrators chanting at the "Drop the Rock" protest outside his mid-Manhattan office last week, Pataki floated another trial balloon in the press, the second time he's done so following his much castigated formal proposal.

Currently mulling a run for the presidency, the Rev. Al Sharpton charged at the "Drop the Rock" demonstration that New York is "throwing entire lives away, with no chance of redemption, no chance of a mainstream American life. They attack the vulnerable, not the source of the drugs."

As a federal judge quoted by Human Rights Watch observed, "It is difficult to believe that the possession of an ounce of cocaine or a $20 'street sale' is a more dangerous or serious offense" than rape, arson or manslaughter. Yet the drug offense may carry more time. HRW added that due to the focus entirely on the drug's weight, "The law does not distinguish between persons whose criminal conduct is limited to a single incident or who are marginal participants … and career criminals or manage[rs] of large criminal enterprises."

The three major candidates for governor in New York this November are all ostensibly in favor of reform. Pataki leads both Democrats, State Comptroller H. Carl McCall and former Clinton cabinet member Andrew M. Cuomo, in the polls by some 20 points. Pataki's state spokesperson, Caroline Quartararo, said Pataki will follow up his leak to the press by proposing a bill within a "few weeks."

But with the Legislature closing down by the end of June at the latest, does that offer enough time to thrash out a bill? Apparently negotiations between the Assembly and the administration have picked up some steam, and Quartararo said Pataki's new director of criminal justice, Chauncey G. Parker, has spent "hundreds of hours meeting with various stakeholders on this."

Speaking to perhaps 200 admiring protestors, Sharpton noted that changing New York's laws, the nation's most repressive, would aid reform nationwide. Then he charged: "Pataki -- quit talking out of both sides of your mouth. We need repeal now. Too many white-collar criminals rob people of billions of dollars and walk away with probation. And yet some kid convicted on a minor reefer arrest does all kinds of state time. It's not fair." Robert Gangi, executive director of the reform organization, the Correctional Association of New York, believes that Pataki does truly want a change, but that he doesn't appreciate the importance of judicial discretion. He concluded, "There's a chance, a real chance."

Noting Pataki's vulnerability in economically depressed upstate New York, Tamar Kraft-Stolar, a coordinator at the Correctional Association, said, "It's clear he wants it off the table during the campaign." She added, "He wants to gain votes without going too far."