Editorial:
The
Moral
Choice
is
Clear
9/24/04
A few years ago I had an
editorial published in some Jewish newspapers that critiqued the drug
war based
on principles of justice as expounded in the Judaic tradition. One need not look far into the texts to find
radical differences between the legal framework called for in a
thoughtful work
of moral philosophy and the reprehensible machine of repression and
injustice
we have created in First, the tradition calls
for a rehabilitative approach to matters of criminal offending. The transgressor who has done injury is taken
into a family's home, to provide work in compensation to the victims
but also
to receive the family's help in learning to become a more responsible
member of
society. If by the end of the seventh
year there are any unpaid debts, those debts are cleared and the
individual is
released from service. The tradition calls for
testimony used in determining guilt to be very carefully vetted for
reliability. No party with an interest
in a case may testify, nor may any whose past conduct has been less
than
upright. Contrast with the drug war, in
which real or accused criminal offenders -- the unreliable people whose
testimony the Judaic tradition proscribes -- are coerced into
testifying
against others through threat of harsher prosecution; or offered
shorter prison
terms or no prison terms -- the priceless commodity of freedom -- in
exchange
for testimony to help prosecutors garner convictions; or in which
informants,
often from the criminal set themselves, are paid for such testimony. The writings lay out
highly nuanced differences in sentencing, pointing to an extremely
thoughtful
and deliberate way of weighing culpability levels, striving in no case
to
over-punish. Contrast this with the
origins of today's mandatory minimum sentences, which were anything but
thoughtful. Eric Sterling of the
Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, who served as a counsel to the
Judiciary
Committee of the House of Representatives in 1986 when those laws were
passed,
has discussed how members of Congress rushed into a bidding war,
competing with
each other to be the toughest on drug offenders following the widely
publicized
cocaine overdose death of Boston Celtics recruit Len Bias.
Congress did not even hold hearings before
radically transforming federal sentencing, And because the guiding principle
is one of compensation more than of punishment, drug prohibition seems
to
conflict with that in principle. Who is to
be compensated by an individual who chose to use drugs but who
committed no
adverse actions against others in the process?
Who is to be held responsible for damages for a private drug
transaction
that took place between willing partners?
And because the guiding principle is one of rehabilitation more
than
punishment, drug prohibition itself seems to conflict with that in
practice. Prohibition does the reverse of
rehabilitation, literally tempting people into lives of crime who might
otherwise have never gone such a route, by creating large, widely
available
profits for engaging in an activity that many consider acceptable. Lest the foregoing
discussion cast too intellectual a sheen on the issue, remember --
always -- there
are half a million nonviolent drug offenders languishing in our
nation's
prisons and jails. Each day going by in
this way is an injustice; each mandatory minimum sentence meted out to
them is
an abomination. The moral choice is
clear.
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