Daily Archives: July 29, 2017

DAMIEN GRANT

Last updated05:00, July 30 2017

ANDY JACKSON/STUFF

Recent deaths from the use of synthetic cannabis are proof of the dangers of taking manufacturing from legitimate business to criminals, writes Damien Grant.

OPINION: The Coroner and police recently alerted the public to eight deaths from the consumption of illegally manufactured synthetic cannabis. The Prime Minister's response is to emphasise personal responsibility, which is odd.

We do not expect the public to take personal responsibility for financing their own healthcare, their children's education or even their own accommodation in the case of the 180,000 people living in state housing.

We regulate our food, house construction, types of petrol and even the effectiveness of sunscreen. But when it comes to young people wanting to get high we demand a level of personal responsibility that we do not expect from the rest of society and leave them exposed to the vicissitudes of a black market stripped from the normal restraints and transparency imposed by commerce.

DAVID WHITE/STUFF

Given Bill English is keen on personal responsibility, perhaps he'd like to accept some for his part in devising a broken system, writes Damien Grant.

One of the few recent parliamentary achievements has been the Psychoactive Substances Act 2013 that, in theory, outlines a pathway for hallucinations to be legally manufactured. In the interim, a small number of existing products were permitted. There were 41 in total.

READ MORE: *Drug law is government-run Russian roulette *Sorry seems to be the hardest word forTurei

Tragically, politics intervened. In April 2014, in reaction to a moral panic in the media and Labour leader David Cunliffe's pending announcement that he wanted to remove those 41 products, Peter Dunne and the Government panicked. All psychoactive substances were banned until they had been through the Act's now impossibly onerous testing regime.

Cunliffe claimed success:"I'd call this a victory for the Opposition, rolling the Government on a situation that was doing immeasurable harm to young New Zealanders".

What the Government was doing was something politically courageous and exactly in-tune with standard left-liberal thinking, but Cunliffe saw a short-term political advantage and could not help himself.

In response to a media beat-up to some people getting sick by taking a commercially manufactured product, the public demanded government action. What the public needed, however, was leadership.

The Government knew, as did the Opposition, that banning these products would not stop people seeking them, nor stop their production. The recent fatalities are a direct consequence of moving their manufacture from the commercial hands of legitimate business people to those prepared to risk decades in jail for a quick buck.

The lesson should be that prohibition leads to the unintended consequences of unsafe products being sold to the vulnerable. What we will get is the police, media and public demanding more aggressive policing and harsher sentences. We will get our wish.

Given Bill English is keen on personal responsibility, perhaps he'd like to accept some for his part in devising a broken system and make amends by providing leadership and tell the public the painful truth: the criminalisation of narcotics has been a failure.

-Sunday Star Times

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Damien Grant: Government's war on drugs has been a failure - Stuff.co.nz

Its a fact that may surprise many liberals: Mass incarceration is a result of way more than the war on drugs.

Over the past few years, long prison sentences for low-level drug offenses have gotten a lot of attention in the media and the public for contributing to higher incarceration rates. But a new report by the Urban Institute suggests it's not these low-level sentences that really helped cause higher imprisonment rates in the US, but rather sentences for violent crimes like murder.

The report is just the latest in a growing body of evidence that mass incarceration has been caused far more by rising punishments for violent offenses than drug offenses and it complicates the traditional liberal narrative about how the US became the world leader in incarceration.

The reports big finding is summed up by the following map:

Lets break this down. First, there are two categories the map above is tracking: the top 10 percent longest time served in prison and the bottom 90 percent. The top 10 percent is marked by the light blue lines, while the bottom 90 percent is marked by the black lines.

This effectively compares prison sentences for the most extreme violent crimes with lower-level crimes, including drug offenses. Among people sentenced before age 25 and serving the longest prison sentences, 94 percent were convicted for violent offenses, and 69 percent of those violent offenders were convicted of murder.

The map shows that time served for the bottom 90 percent didnt increase much, if at all, in most states with the important exception of California, given that its the most populous state. Instead, the much bigger increase was seen in the top 10 percent.

What this shows, essentially, is that prison sentence length for lower-level offenses did not increase much, while prison sentence length for some of the worst offenses vastly increased.

Longer sentences are stacking up, Ryan King, the lead researcher for the Urban report, told me. And in many states, the data suggest that theyre stacking up at a rate significant enough that it can offset reforms for the less serious offenses.

The report includes various other findings. It found there are vast racial disparities in the top 10 percent of prison sentences, just as there are for lower-level offenses. The people locked up also tend to be fairly young, which robs communities particularly black neighborhoods of people who could grow up to be productive citizens instead of serving out disproportionately harsh sentences. It also told the stories of a few people who suffered through some of these long sentences. You should really read the whole thing.

But I want to home in on the big finding because it shows what the traditional story about mass incarceration has gotten wrong. Much of the attention has gone to harsh mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses, but they seem to have had a fairly small impact on overall incarceration rates. What seemed to change, instead, is that the system enforced longer prison sentences for some of the worst offenses and that led to a lot more imprisonment.

The findings really give more credence to the growing body of evidence that prison sentences for violent, not drug, offenses have led to a sharp rise in US incarceration levels.

Perhaps the best source for all the evidence so far is criminologist John Pfaffs book Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform, for which you can read my book review as well.

Heres the short version: Much of the attention to mass incarceration, including from reform efforts, has gone to low-level offenses, especially for drug and property crimes. In large part, this is likely a result of the media focusing too much on the federal prison system instead of the state prison systems: While about half of federal prisoners are in for drug crimes, only about 16 percent of state prisoners are and more than half of state prisoners are in for violent crimes.

This is notable because the great majority 87 percent of prisoners in the US are housed at the state level, not the federal level. So to greatly reduce incarceration, the country will need to focus on the state level. And to do a lot at the state level, the US will need to reduce the incarceration of violent offenders.

This obviously gets a lot trickier, politically, than addressing low-level drug offenses. A poll conducted by Morning Consult for Vox last year, for example, found that nearly eight in 10 US voters support reducing prison sentences for people who committed a nonviolent crime and have a low risk of reoffending. But fewer than three in 10 backed shorter prison sentences for people who committed a violent crime and have a low risk of reoffending.

Its one of the spaces where the policy and public safety arguments are going to have the least impact, Pfaff acknowledged, because many will view it as the right thing to do to lock them up forever.

But there are ways to cut prison sentences for violent offenders without leading to more crime.

For one, incarceration is simply not a good way to combat crime. A 2015 review of the research by the Brennan Center for Justice estimated that more incarceration and its abilities to incapacitate or deter criminals explained about 0 to 7 percent of the crime drop since the 1990s. Other researchers estimate it drove 10 to 25 percent of the crime drop since the 90s. And a 2014 analysis by the Pew Charitable Trusts found that states that reduced their imprisonment rates also saw some of the biggest drops in crime, suggesting that there isnt a hard link between incarceration and crime.

These figures explain the cause against mass incarceration: Not only does it deprive a lot of people of their rights and take a lot of people out of their communities, but it also isnt even particularly effective at stopping crime.

The research also shows that people age out of crime. A 60-year-old is simply much less likely to attack or rob someone than is a 20-year-old. That means its possible to sentence violent offenders to five, 10, or 20 years instead of 30 or 40 years, or life without dramatically increasing the chances that theyll reoffend.

There are also new ideas for reintegrating people into society without the threat of long prison sentences. Researchers Mark Kleiman, Angela Hawken, and Ross Halperin, for example, suggested a graduated reentry system that would support people who are released from prison and then slowly give them back their rights as they hit certain milestones, such as getting and keeping a job.

This kind of policy, along with reductions in legislative mandates for lengths of prison sentences, could help cut how much time even violent offenders serve in prison. And that would help address a major contributor to mass incarceration, based on Urbans analysis.

Still, there are limits to how far simply cutting prison sentences, particularly at the legislative level, could go.

Typically, much of the attention in the criminal justice reform world goes to cutting lengthy prison sentences for drugs particularly mandatory minimums that require judges to impose a lengthy punishment even if they dont want to. Similarly, reformers might think its a good idea to focus on cutting the length of long prison sentences for violent crimes as well.

Pfaff argues this would only go so far because the problem goes much deeper than what state law says is an appropriate sentence for a certain crime. He points to how the sentences are implemented at the local level, particularly by prosecutors.

Looking at California county-level data, Pfaff highlighted that some counties have much higher median sentences for their worst offenders than others. So while the state median for time served among the 95th percentile was 23 years in 2014, it was 33.5 years for San Francisco County, nearly 25 years for Los Angeles County, and 21 years for Sacramento County. The differences between high-population counties suggest there is a lot of variation in how prosecutors enforce the laws that state policymakers create for them.

Theres an incredibly different story across counties, even among counties with similar populations, Pfaff argued. We dont want to lose sight of trying to regulate the prosecutors, the plea deals they make, and how they charge people.

Pfaffs finding dovetails with some of his earlier work, which found that prosecutors not more arrests or crime drove much of the increase in incarceration since the 1990s. Analyzing data from state judiciaries, he compared the number of crimes, arrests, and prosecutions from 1994 to 2008. He found that reported violent and property crime fell, and arrests for almost all crimes also fell. But one thing went up: the number of felony cases filed in court. In short, prosecutors were filing more charges even as crime and arrests dropped, throwing more people into the prison system. Prosecutors were driving mass incarceration.

So to really crack down on mass incarceration, policymakers will need to find a way to reel back prosecutors on top of the kind of policy recommendations that Urban makes for reducing prison sentences and time served.

This also shows just how complicated the problem really is. We often talk about the US criminal justice system as if its just one system. In reality, its more than 3,100 systems, representing every county and county equivalent in America. As Pfaff wrote in his book, [T]he term criminal justice system is a misnomer; criminal justice is, at best, a set of systems, and at worst it is a swirling mess of somewhat antagonistic agencies.

To really address the problem of mass incarceration, then, its not enough to just focus on drug crimes; its also important to focus on violent offenses. Its also not enough to just focus on the laws guiding prison sentences; its also necessary to look at how those laws are enforced in the real world. And addressing all of these issues will require a truly systemic effort from addressing what the local prosecutor is doing to what laws state policymakers pass to what the president and his attorney general are asking the US Department of Justice to do.

It will be a long, arduous effort. After years of lawmakers building up incarceration at every level of government, it will likely take years of more policymaking at every level of government to unwind what previous generations of leaders have done.

This is a long-term project, King of Urban said. But we do see it as one thats ringing a bell saying, look, were going to have to deal with this.

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Liberals often blame mass incarceration on the war on drugs. That's not quite right. - Vox

An officer and his dog walk the halls at a school in Indianapolis.

The United States has been waging a war on drugs for nearly 50 years.

Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent on this long campaign to thwart the production, distribution, sale and use of illegal drugs. This sustained investment has resulted in millions of drug offenders being processed through the American criminal justice system. It has also influenced crime control strategies used by American police.

Under President Barack Obama, there was a period of reform and moderating of tactics. But President Donald Trumps attorney general, Jeff Sessions, is announcing plans to return to law and order approaches, such as aggressive intervention by law enforcement and use of mandatory minimum sentences by prosecutors.

I recently co-authored a book with University of Louisville criminal justice professor Richard Tewksbury on the role of confidential informants. In my view, a return to a law and order approach would undo recent gains in reducing crime rates as well as prison populations and would further strain tense police-community relations.

Unlike violent or property crimes which usually yield cooperative victims and witnesses police and prosecutors are at a disdvantage when fighting drugs. Drug users dont see themselves as crime victims or their dealers as criminals. Police thus have limited options for identifying offenders. Alternatives include the use of undercover operations or conducting aggressive crackdown operations to disrupt the market in real time. But sneaking up on or infiltrating secretive and multilayered drug organizations is not easy to do, and usually produces only low-level offenders. Poor police-community relations dont help. Heightened enforcement and punishments have made matters worse by increasing the secrecy and sophistication of the illegal drug market and forcing police to develop criminal intelligence on offenders.

So how do police gather criminal intelligence on drug crimes?

The most honorable way is to rely on law-abiding sources who see the criminal activity and feel compelled to report it to the police in order to stop the problem.

The second option is for police to turn to a paid informant who is familiar with the drug operations to set up a buy or inform on the criminal activities of others in exchange for money.

A third option is to apprehend known drug offenders and coerce them into divulging information on higher-ups in exchange for a lighter sentence. We call these folks indentured informants because they owe the police information. If they dont follow through on their end of the deal, they face the weight of criminal prosecution, often through heavy mandatory minimum sentences.

As police-community relations have eroded over time, police have slowly but surely increased their reliance on criminal informants especially to develop cases on higher-level criminals.

Mandatory minimum sentences serve as a strong motivator to snitch. It has become the go-to move for authorities.

Not surprisingly, drug dealers fight back against this coercive method of getting evidence with a stop snitchin campaign. Retaliatory violence often erupts, and it becomes harder for police to get evidence from both criminal and civic-minded informants who fear reprisals from drug dealers. Anger grows against police who are perceived as not following through on promises to protect witnesses or clean up neighborhoods.

There exists yet another wrinkle in the equation. Reliance on harsh drug sentences and confidential informants has become part and parcel to how other types of criminal cases are solved. Witnesses or persons privy to information in homicide or robbery cases are routinely prodded into cooperating only after they find themselves facing a stiff penalty due to their involvement in an unrelated drug case. Here again, this produces short-term gains but long-term complications for criminal justice authorities as states move to decriminalize or legalize drugs. What happens when prosecutors working violent or property crime cases can no longer rely on the threat of mandatory minimum sentences to compel individuals to provide information?

By exploiting intelligence sources and putting them at risk, the war on drugs has pitted the police against residents in drug-ridden communities. This runs contrary to the ideals of community policing, in which trust and legitimacy are essential to members of the community and law enforcement collaborating to prevent and combat crime.

The past decade has witnessed significant reforms within the criminal justice system, particularly as it relates to drug enforcement. Authorities have sought to integrate a public health approach into the long-standing criminal justice model and adopt a more patient and long-term view on the drug problem. In the end, the reliance on informants and mandatory minimum sentences creates numerous unanticipated negative consequences which will continue to grow if we revert back to them.

See the original post here:

Reviving the war on drugs will further harm police-community relations - The Conversation US

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte addresses thousands of protesters following his state of the nation address outside the Lower House Monday, July 24, 2017 in Quezon city, northeast of Manila, Philippines. Bullit Marquez / AP

Thousands of protesters marched outside Congress demanding he deliver on a range of promises which mirror the diverse burdens of his presidency, from protecting human rights to improving internet speed.

A look at the most serious issues confronting Duterte as he enters his second year in power.

ISLAMIC STATE-LINKED SIEGE

Two months after more than 600 pro-Islamic State group militants blasted their way into the southern city of Marawi, the military is still fighting the last gunmen fewer than 100, about 10 of them foreign. Duterte told reporters after his speech Monday that the government counteroffensive will not stop "until the last terrorist is taken out."

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The crisis, however, may not end soon, according to Duterte, because troops have to move carefully to ensure the safety of about 300 hostages he said are being held by the gunmen. "I don't want these innocent people to be slaughtered," he said.

Congress overwhelmingly voted on Saturday to grant Duterte's request to extend martial law in the south to the end of the year to allow Duterte to deal with the Marawi crisis and stamp out other extremist groups across the south, something five presidents before him have failed to do.

About half a million people have been displaced by the Marawi fighting. Some have threatened to march back to the still-besieged city to escape the squalor in overcrowded evacuation camps in nearby towns. Rebuilding Marawi will require massive funds and national focus and will be fraught with pitfalls. Amid the despair and gargantuan rebuilding, it's important "to ensure that extremist teachings do not find fertile ground," said Sidney Jones, director of the Jakarta-based Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict.

DRUG WAR

Despite criticism and threats of criminal prosecution, Duterte said his drug crackdown, which has left thousands of suspects dead, will go on. "Do not try to scare me with prison or the International Court of Justice," he said Monday. "I'm willing to go to prison for the rest of my life." He reiterated his plea that Congress reimpose the death penalty for drug offenders and others.

"The fight will not stop until those who deal in (drugs) understand that they have to stop because the alternatives are either jail or hell," Duterte said, to applause from his national police chief, Ronald del Rosa, and other supporters in the audience.

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During the campaign, he promised to rid the country of illegal drugs in three to six months and repeatedly threatened traffickers with death. But he missed his deadline and later declared he would fight the menace until his last day in office. When then-U.S. President Barack Obama, along with European Union and U.N. rights officials, raised alarm over the mounting death toll from the crackdown, Duterte lashed out at them, telling Obama to "go to hell." Duterte's fiercest critic at home, Sen. Leila del Lima, was detained in February on drug charges she said were baseless.

More than 5,200 suspects have died so far, including more than 3,000 in reported gunbattles with police and more than 2,000 others in drug-related attacks by motorcycle-riding masked gunmen and other assaults, police said. Human rights groups have reported a higher toll and called for an independent investigation into Duterte's possible role in the violence.

Duterte "has unleashed a human rights calamity on the Philippines in his first year in office," U.S.-based Human Rights Watch said. In April, a lawyer filed a complaint of crimes against humanity against Duterte and other officials in connection with the drug killings before the International Criminal Court. An impeachment complaint against the president was dismissed in the House of Representatives, which is dominated by Duterte's allies.

SOUTH CHINA SEA

More than a month into Duterte's presidency, the Philippines won a landmark arbitration case before a tribunal in The Hague that invalidated China's massive territorial claims in the South China Sea under a 1982 U.N. maritime treaty.

Aiming to turn around his country's frosty relations with China, Duterte refused to demand immediate Chinese compliance with the ruling. He promised he would take it up with Beijing at some point. Confronting China, which has dismissed the ruling as a sham, risks sparking an armed conflict that the Philippines would surely lose, Duterte contended.

In a news conference Monday, Duterte said he told Chinese President Xi Jinping during a Beijing visit last year that the Philippines would drill for oil in disputed areas it asserts as its own, and that Xi responded that such an action would spark an armed confrontation.

Nationalists and critics blasted Duterte for what they see as a sellout to China. After the Xi meeting, China allowed Filipino fishermen to return to Chinese-controlled Scarborough Shoal, where Chinese coast guard ships drove Filipinos away in 2012.

The Philippines had been the most vocal critic of China's assertive behavior in the disputed waters until Duterte took power and reached out to Beijing, partly to secure funding for infrastructure projects.

His move has de-escalated tensions in the busy sea, but critics have warned that Duterte's friendly overtures to China may erode the country's chances of demanding that China comply with the ruling and relinquish its claims to waters regarded as the Philippines' exclusive economic zone.

See more here:

Philippine President Duterte Vows to Continue Nation's War on Drugs - NBCNews.com

Sacramento Bee (blog)

Paying black people reparations for the war on drugs? Not as crazy as it sounds Sacramento Bee (blog) The abandoned houses. The crumbling infrastructure. The struggling families. The devastation from the drug war was still there, the president of California Urban Partnership told me over coffee last week. All of the pain and suffering from ...

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Paying black people reparations for the war on drugs? Not as crazy as it sounds - Sacramento Bee (blog)

Sacramento Bee

Russia sanctions, reparations for the war on drugs, and deaths in San Antonio Sacramento Bee Erika D. Smith: Paying black people reparations for the war on drugs? Not as crazy as it sounds: People of color who went to prison for selling marijuana are on the verge of being cut out of California's legal industry. Op-Eds. Eloy Ortiz Oakley, Ben ...

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Russia sanctions, reparations for the war on drugs, and deaths in San Antonio - Sacramento Bee