That same kind of reform is catching on in other states. One example is Connecticut, where similar drug laws were passed in the wake of the Rockefeller drug laws.
Connecticut’s drug laws in the 1980s and 1990s were “right on par with New York,” said Lorenzo Jones, executive director of A Better Way Foundation, a nonprofit advocacy group focusing on drug law reform.
“Like almost every state, we had a huge amount of people doing time for drug-related offenses. The prisons are loaded up with drug offenders—there’s no doubt about it. At the end of the day, you had a lot of people in prison,” said Connecticut Rep. Mike Lawlor.
“Connecticut, like a lot of other states, our prisons are bursting at the seams and we’re trying to figure out ways to bring that prison population down.”
Lawlor thinks mandatory minimum sentences along with harsh penalties for even trace amounts of drugs had a lot to do with the problem.
“My sense is that the existence of the mandatory minimums gave the prosecutors quite a bit of leverage in the plea bargaining process. So a lot of people ended up pleading to jail or prison time mainly because if they didn’t, then they went to trial and they’d get much longer,” Lawlor said.
Lawlor used to be a prosecutor and saw the effects firsthand.
For instance, under Connecticut’s old drug laws, a person caught selling as little as half a gram of crack cocaine—the solid form of the drug—could face a potential life prison sentence. But the laws treated other forms of the same drug differently. Selling 1 ounce of cocaine in powder form—that’s equal to 28.3 grams—triggered the same potential life prison sentence.
The mandatory minimum sentence was also different for the two forms of cocaine. Half a gram of crack cocaine triggered a mandatory five-year minimum prison sentence while an entire ounce of powder cocaine triggered the five-year minimum prison sentence.
Half a gram of crack cocaine—which equals roughly half a packet of sugar substitute—amounted to about $30 if sold on the street, while 1 ounce of powder cocaine would amount to about $700 if sold on the street, according to Jones.
But in 2005, Connecticut reformed the laws and balanced the punishment for the two forms of the drug, raising the quantity threshold for crack and lowering the threshold for the powder form of cocaine. The new threshold is half an ounce for either drug.
The state’s drug laws also include increased penalties for school zone laws—those that address possessing or selling drugs within a certain distance of schools, day care centers and public housing projects. What began in the late 1980s as a minimum sentence triggered by selling drugs within 1,000 feet of a school in all directions, increased over the years to a 1,500-foot radius from schools, day cares and public housing projects, according to Lawlor.
The problem was, in the state’s urban areas like New Haven, the school zones encompass virtually every location in the city.
“So you start drawing those circles and it pretty much covers every square inch of the town,” Lawlor said.
So drug offenders caught virtually anywhere in the cities are charged under the school zone laws, which often come with increased penalties. And consequently, many residents of the state’s urban areas are from various racial backgrounds, as compared to the nonurban areas of the state, which are mostly white, Lawlor said.
He would like to see the school zone laws reformed, because based on his observations, the school zone laws are resulting in racial disparities in the state’s prisons.
And even though the Rockefeller reforms signal a shift in drug law policy in the states, it’s not over yet. That’s evident when it comes to the school zone laws in Connecticut, Lawlor said. Drug law reform touches on many issues including budget, justice issues and issues of racial disparities, he said.
But right now, it just may be the budget pressures that are speaking the loudest.
“The budget reality in a lot of states is forcing people to say, alright do you really need to put all these people in jail … it gets really expensive at one point, like the point we’re at now, it’s really expensive. Unless you make a change, it’s going to keep on getting worse,” Lawlor said.
—Mikel Chavers is associate editor of State News magazine.
