Cuyahoga Drug War is an Assault on Minorities
Cleveland Plain Dealer
Louis E. Filippelli
March 6, 2002
Hats off to the Rev. Marvin McMickle for bringing to light a problem that has been ignored for much too long in our community.
Our criminal justice system, especially its treatment of minorities, is a disaster and deserves to be blasted.Sitting on a grand jury for four months, McMickle witnessed a part of our justice system that is essentially a well-kept secret from most citizens. The prosecutor’s office pretty much controls the grand juries, and practically everyone arrested is indicted. Since police target the minority neighborhoods, most defendants are either African-American or Hispanic.
Three of every four felony cases are drug-related, and the vast majority are for petty offenses. It is no wonder our court dockets are jammed, and the numbers keep growing. Last year, an absurd 19,000 indictments were issued.
Maybe Cuyahoga County Prosecutor William Mason and his staff need to concentrate on prosecuting violent criminals and live within their budget. Mason would not have to go over the heads of our county commissioners to get money that has been earmarked for other social agencies.
Lastly, other minority leaders need to follow McMickle’s example and raise a stink about this issue. The black community is being hoodwinked into thinking it is being protected from drugs when, in reality, the goal seems to be to give as many people as possible a criminal record.
Coercion is Key to Drug Treatment
Cleveland Plain Dealer
Beth Barber, Associate Editor
March 5, 2002
The Rev. Marvin McMickle has two-thirds of a good idea.
After a recent stint as grand-jury foreman, McMickle wrote Richard McMonagle, presiding judge of the Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court, to suggest (among other things) that drug treatment and education beat incarceration for the low-level drug offenders who are flooding the criminal justice system.Make it education, mandated drug treatment and incarceration in a drug-treatment jail if outpatient treatment fails, and you’ve added an element essential to ending the recidivism more common in drug-abusing than nondrug-abusing offenders: coercion.
Why is coercion essential? Because most drug-abusers won’t go into treatment, or stay in treatment long enough, unless forced to. Yet the shorter their stay in treatment – a year is minimal – the less effective it is.
So why let them cycle endlessly from neighborhood to crime to jail to neighborhood, crime and jail, when studies show that mandated treatment is as effective, in some cases more so, than voluntary treatment?
According to studies from across the nation compiled by Dr. Sally L. Satel of the American Enterprise Institute in a pamphlet called “Drug Treatment: The Case for Coercion”:
Only a relative few drug-abusers volunteer for treatment. Of those, half drop out within 90 days – and have three times the rearrest rates of program graduates. Eighty to 90 percent drop out within a year – and have twice the rearrest rates of graduates.
Twice as many drug-abusing offenders in court-ordered treatment make it through a year than do noncriminal addicts who enroll in tax-paid programs.
“Therapeutic” treatment in jail – that is, segregating nonviolent, drug-abusing offenders from the rest of the inmates – and intensive follow-up on parole correlated strongly with longer periods of sobriety and fewer rearrests.
A court-ordered program that diverts offenders from jail to long-term residential treatment in the community (at a third less cost than incarceration) has reduced recidivism even among the more hard-core, longtime drug-abusing offenders.
If they graduate, that is. Eighty to 92 percent of dropouts returned to custody, on average, within a week of release from the system.
If imposed predictably and consistently, sanctions alone – say, two days in jail for a first “dirty” drug test, 10 days for the second, etc. – are more effective against drug use and rearrest than both drug treatment with sporadic or no sanctions and drug testing without sanctions.The experience in the Cleveland Municipal Court drug court reflects this national picture. Drug-abusing offenders are loath even to begin the one-year treatment program in lieu of jail, much less to complete it.
The word on the street, confirmed by court officials and court data, is that the program is just too much work. Addicted criminals would rather serve their 90 days in jail and be done with the court system . . . until they commit another crime.Why wait for repeat offenses, and a felony charge, to mandate drug treatment – in a drug-treatment jail, in a residential facility, in an outpatient diversion program, whichever offenders and offenses warrant?
If offenders drop out of residential or outpatient treatment, as many will, then send them not to a jail but to a drug-treatment jail, a population captive to drug abuse made captive to drug treatment instead.
The cost to taxpayers could hardly be more than the cumulative cost of housing drug abusers in any cell available, of replacing what they steal, of allaying the crime and fear of crime in neighborhoods they plague, of losing productive lives to drug abuse, of ameliorating the poverty, neglect and despair of children whose parents are drug abusers.
If there’s a compelling need for treatment of drug-abusing criminal offenders – and we all know there is – then there’s a compelling need to compel it.
Locking up Blacks is No Solution
Cleveland Plain Dealer
Phillip Morris, Plain Dealer Associate Editor
March 5, 2002
Having completed a four-month tour of duty as foreman of a Cuyahoga County grand jury last month, the Rev. Marvin McMickle publicly described the process as having an “apartheid feel to it.”
McMickle, a thoughtful man, deliberately minimized the horrors of apartheid with such irresponsible language and at the same time slighted all of those citizens who take their turns serving as grand jurors. But how does one begrudge an important community leader his honest impression or reaction?
Well, for one, the impression could have been informed. His wasn’t. But the letter McMickle wrote to Richard McMonagle, presiding judge of the Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court, containing his observations remains somewhat instructive and might contribute to a desperately needed community (and national) conversation.
He wrote:
“My general impression of the grand jury process had an apartheid feel to it, with largely white enforcement officers bringing evidence to largely white grand jury panels to issue indictments of largely African-American and Hispanic defendants. I know this is the perception that exists in the wider black community, and as long as that perception is allowed to stand, there will be suspicion and resentment toward the entire criminal justice apparatus.”Setting aside McMickle’s stated concerns about the dearth of African-American assistant county prosecutors and the lack of drug intervention programs – an observation refuted by McMonagle and by County Prosecutor Bill Mason – McMickle is on to something much more important.
And that is the continued devastation America’s “war on drugs” is wreaking on African American communities. The rate at which young black men are convicted and incarcerated is simply shocking.
The numbers tell a horrifying story of communities that are crumbling at the core because an enormous percentage of their young males are being socially and politically aborted. These numbers affect us all because they come with tremendous social and financial consequences.
Consider these figures, compiled recently by Human Rights Watch (drug-related offenses drive these statistics):
Nationwide black men are incarcerated at nearly 10 times the rate of white men.
Blacks comprise 13 percent of the national population but 30 percent of people arrested, 41 percent of people in jail, and 49 percent of those in prison.
Nine percent of all black adults are under some form of correctional supervision (jail, prison probation or parole), compared with 2 percent of whites.
One in three black men between the ages of 20 and 29 was jailed, imprisoned, on parole or on probation in 1995.
Thirteen percent of the black adult male population has lost the right to vote because of felony disenfranchisement laws.
African-Americans comprise 11 percent of Ohio’s population but make up 73 percent of those incarcerated on drug charges.
What do these figures really mean? This is where the conversation gets exceedingly tricky.
Shortly after his sermon on Sunday, McMickle asked me rhetorically whether the black, inner-city crack dealer or user was more likely to be arrested and eventually incarcerated than the suburban white offender.
The answer appears to be obvious:
African-American communities, which were being rocked by open-market drug trafficking and gun violence in the late 1980s and early 1990s, called for police and political help. The result was the passage of tough laws that could send low-level dealers away for minuscule amounts of drugs.
The laws have worked – too well. In some ways, the neighborhoods are safer. But in other invisible ways, the enforcement of drug laws has wreaked more far-reaching havoc in the underlying structure of black communities than the crack violence did at its zenith.
So what is the solution?
It must start with the squelching of the appetite for drug consumption and trafficking. This is not a call for legalization, but the profit motive must be directly addressed. Most young men who sell crack-cocaine don’t use it themselves, studies have shown. They merely profit from it and sabotage their own communities.
The answer is not, unfortunately, as easy as sweeping black men into the nearest penitentiary. His language and uninformed assumptions aside, McMickle has performed an important public service.
Morris is an associate editor of The Plain Dealer’s editorial pages.