Hope For Rockefeller Laws Repeal
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- Published in: Lives In Focus
As Democrats captured a majority in the state senate for the first time since 1964, beating out Republican incumbents in two districts, the new political landscape has many reformers anticipating a once-in-a-generation opportunity to influence longstanding legislation.
“If the governor puts a serious proposal for repeal or sweeping reform on the table it’s likely to be taken up by the Democratic senate,” said Robert Gangi, executive director of the Correctional Association of New York, a drug policy group.
Enacted in 1973 by then-governor Nelson Rockefeller, the tough on crime statues established mandatory minimum sentences for drug-related offenses, limiting judicial discretion on the length and type of sentences handed out. Last year more than 20% of new inmates, or roughly 12,000 prisoners in the New York state correctional system were committed for drug-related offenses. Over the last 35 years, hundreds of thousands of offenders have been sentenced under these laws.
This is not the time to be changing this law. Do you have any idea how many jobs depend on the prison and criminal justice industry? With the economy the way it is, we simply cannot afford to lose these good paying jobs. Most of these people locked up are black anyway, so who cares? I’ll be writting my reps to tell them not to support this, we need more good paying jobs like the ones the war on drugs gives us.
With the continuing gargantuan growth of the US prison system (Federal, state, and local)one wag(may have been G. Carlin) has predicted that by the year 2025, every adult in the country will be employed by the prison system.(But who will manage our financial system ,or keep us out of unjustified wars,etc.etc.?) We now have over 2,000,000 men, women, and children inncarcerated for a variety of offenses, and a large percentage of those in the slammer because of addiction, not distribution.Our per capita incarceration rate for drug use far exeeds the rate of any other western nation.And,our total per capita incarceration rate for all offenses far exceeds that of all western nations.I see that Switzerland has just decriminalized the use of heroin, but not marijuana.Interesting. So, in summary, I say “you go New York, you go Switzerland.” Hope some day I can say “You go, America.”