The Human Casualties of the War on Drugs

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http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/12/the-human-casualties-of-the-war-on-drugs/266622/


Jarecki in 2006. (Seth Wenig/Reuters)

The year began with a line that was as much a lamentation as it was an astute observation. "The scale and brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life," Adam Gopnik wrote in a trenchant essay in the January 30th issue of the New Yorker. "How did we get here? How is it that our civilization, which rejects hanging and flogging and disemboweling, came to believe that caging vast numbers of people for decades is an acceptably humane condition?"

The year ends with filmmaker Eugene Jarecki touring the country -- visiting prisons, prosecutors' conferences, schools -- showing off his heartbreaking documentary, The House I Live In, an acclaimed collection of interlocking stories about the mournful human impact of America's failed war on drugs. Did you know there is a man serving a life sentence in Oklahoma for "trafficking" three ounces of methamphetamine? Did you know that the rise of privately-owned prisons means that there is now a direct financial incentive to incarcerate people?

The 11 months in between these two statements were extraordinarily fruitful ones in this area of law and justice. And almost all of the change seemed to reflect a growing sense of unease, or even disgust, on the part of America's criminal justice community -- lawyers, judges, politicians, prison officials, etc. -- a sense that the status quo is unsustainable, that America can no longer afford, on either financial or moral terms, to keep millions of its citizens locked up. It's too early to label 2012 a turning point in our war against the war on drugs. But it's not to early to see a definitive trend in that direction.

In June, for example, in a case styled Dorsey v. United States, the United States Supreme Court endorsed new federal sentencing rules that finally reduced the disparity in minimum sentences between crack and powder cocaine offenders. In a 5-4 ruling, over the objections of the conservative justices, the court declared that the new, more lenient rules applied to defendants who had committed their crimes before the 2010 law came into effect but who were sentenced afterward. The ratio is still too high -- 18-to-1, by Congressional decree -- but the 2010 law and the 2012 ruling were significant advances toward a just cause.