It's the story of a woman who, with the aid of her mother and nine year old son, was selling marijuana out of the house after losing her job in 2009. For a first offense, which consisted of selling $31 worth of pot to an undercover officer, Patricia Spottedcrow was sentenced to ten years in state prison. For the moment let's set aside the absurdity of anti marijuana laws and the high costs of enforcing them. We'll just ignore the direct cost of policing a drug that is both less addictive and less dangerous than nicotine, and for the sake of argument we'll pretend there is no opportunity cost to spending manpower hours conducting undercover stings against marijuana dealers. But it's a lot harder to ignore the high cost of long term incarceration of nonviolent pot heads and the people that supply them, particularly when the United States already has a larger percentage of its population in prison than South Africa did under Apartheid.
We need to question our national motives when it comes to tougher sentencing for drug crimes.
Is it utilitarian? That is to say, is the greater good served by putting potheads in jail? Tougher sentences haven't acted as a deterrent - drug use is not on the decline after decades of raising the stakes. It's no longer rational to argue that tougher sentences will lead to less drugs on our streets - that experiment has demonstrably failed. Nor can we plausibly claim that it's rehabilitive. Recidivism rates remain high, and ex convicts face enormous challenges on reentering society coupled with years of exposure to other criminals, leading to escalation from victimless crimes to more dangerous and disruptive forms of criminal behavior. Nor is it fiscally responsible - the cost of incarceration dramatically exceeds the cost of government run or subsidized rehabilitation programs, which do not lead to the same types of escalation.
Is it retributive? If our motive is to punish, then ten year sentences for the sale of marijuana are extreme, and mandatory minimums for people with an addiction are arbitrary overreactions. Certainly those who break the law ought to be punished, but the punishments in many drug related cases no longer plausibly fit the crime, particularly in cases where the criminal and the victim are one and the same person.
Which leaves only a false sense of security. National frustration over our seeming inability to control the drug problem in this country has led to ever increasing tough talk and tougher policy that makes us feel safer but has done nothing to address the underlying problems.
Thanks to the budget crisis in Oklahoma, Patricia Spottedcrow may not have to serve out her entire sentence, but she'll still face enormous hurdles upon her release. Now that is has become clear that our strategy for fighting the ''war on drugs'' is not working, isn't it time to look for a new one?
