Drop the Rock
by Rob Robinson 

Well it has been 33 years since Governor Nelson Rockefeller enacted the Rockefeller Drug Laws. These laws mandate stiff mandatory minimum sentences for low-level drug offenses. There are now well over 15,000 drug offenders in NY's prisons; most of them minor offenders with no history of violent behavior and it costs NY taxpayers nearly $500 million a year to imprison these drug offenders.

It has been over a year and a half since the
Legislature and the Governor took the first steps
toward repeal of these harsh laws. What is so ironic
of the 2004 reform that we all heard about in the
press, was that it ended life sentences that were
imposed on those convicted of the most serious drug felonies, it ignored the more than 4,500 people incarcerated for less severe offenses. Those guilty of the less severe offenses can't appeal for re-sentencing based on this change of law.

In May  the state Assembly passed a bill that would extend drug law reform to more than 4,000 people in New York's prisons. So now the Assembly has passed
this new legislation authored by Jeffrion Aubry, D-Queens. But that still leaves the bill far from law.
 

So when will we get real reform?

The "soft" reform bill that was passed in 2004 seems to have taken the wind out of the sail of the Drop the Rock movement and taken the pressure off the Senate and the Governor.
 
Time to put the pressure back on people! Elections are coming.

Over 92% of the people locked up in NY for drug offenses are African American or Latino, despite research showing that the vast majority of people who use and sell drugs are white. At current levels of incarceration, newborn black males in this country have a greater than one in four chance of going to prison during their US lifetimes, while Latin-American males have a one in six chance, and white males have a one in twenty-three chance of serving prison time in their lifetimes. Despite their lower presence in the drug using and general population, minorities face severe racial disparities in drug arrests. The difference in arrest rates, as well as convictions and longer sentences between blacks and whites are significant, stark and unambiguous. Sadly, in this area, justice is not blind.

Research shows that drug treatment is cheaper than imprisonment and more successful in reducing drug related crime.

So what is the incentive for this to keep going and going and going...

Currently, here in New York State, an odious situation exists that encourages upstate communities to clamor for ever increasing prison construction and that situation is this: For every resident of a poor inner-city community (generally black and Democratic) transferred to a prison facility in an upstate (generally white and Republican) community, the downstate community loses a voting resident while the upstate community gains a non-voting resident (prisoners, are not permitted to vote). This bolsters the census numbers and all the benefits in terms of public money that adhere thereto of the upstate community to the extreme detriment of the downstate community from which the prisoners were taken.

33 years of this shit, in NY? We've come along way
baby!

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