Sure, everything’s bigger in Texas. Except, that is, jail sentences for casual stoners who get caught toking up.
Houston’s newly elected district attorney, Kim Ogg, is issuing the lightest sentence the statute allows for in cases for minor marijuana possession. Instead of being tossed behind bars, most pot smokers can pay $150 fine and take a four-hour-long class on decision-making. Plus, the incident is kept off their record.
Ogg, a Democrat, made the push for leniency the centerpiece of her 2016 campaign for district attorney. It was a bold gamble when running against a Republican incumbent in a red state known for being tough on crime, but Ogg managed to gain conservative votes by pledging to go after “violent criminals, burglars and white-collar thieves,” instead. She won by eight points.
Criminal justice reformers did not see Ogg’s win as new freedom to light up a joint, but as an electoral strategy that could offer a roadmap for changing drug policy in traditionally strict counties across the country. Theoretically, they don’t need to write new laws; they can vote out incumbents that read laws as mandates to incarcerate drug users.
The concept, of course, has its critics. Next door in Montgomery County, District Attorney Brett Ligon told the Houston Chronicle that Ogg was making Houston into a “sanctuary for dope smokers.”
Additionally, it’s unclear if any of the money typically spent misdemeanor marijuana prosecutions will be saved. Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner referred to the program as “cost efficient,” but several officials say that taxpayers likely won’t see a dime. Instead, resources will be spent on more dangerous threats to public safety.
“Harris County has spent more than $200 million in the past decade on more than 100,000 cases of misdemeanor marijuana possession,” Ogg said. “The endeavor has had no tangible public safety benefit.” Rather, the marijuana crackdown “has deprived neighborhoods of officers’ time that could be spent patrolling communities, jail beds that could be used for violent criminals, crime lab resources needed for DNA testing and judicial court time that could be spent bringing serious criminals to justice.”
Research shows that lenient drug policies such as this can result in lower recidivism rates. In Houston, it’s too early to tell. A person can retake the class repeatedly, so long as they are eligible. But prosecutors can also label someone a “serial offender” and argue to a judge for a stricter punishment.
For now, the district attorney’s office is riding (ahem) high. Since the program launched on March 1, almost 900 people have avoided jail time and law enforcement is focusing its attention on break-ins and violence assaults instead.
MORE: To Reduce Drug Use, These Members of the Criminal Justice Community Advocate for Legalization, Not Criminalization
Homepage photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images.
Tag: Decriminalization of Drugs
For Rave Promoters, Overdose Education Tops Drug Enforcement
It was a dark weekend back in August 2013, with a lot of die-hard EDM (electronic dance music, to the uninitiated) fans extremely bummed out about one for their favorite summer events getting canned a day early. The reason? MDMA, aka “molly” or ecstasy, had claimed two lives at NYC’s Electric Zoo.
The same month, another died at the House of Blues in Boston. This year, there has been two more deaths due to the designer drug in Las Vegas and Los Angeles and, according to BuzzFeed, an astonishing 50 people required medical attention at Boston’s TD Garden in June after getting sick from drug use.
So it’s no surprise that this year’s Electric Zoo attendees arrived to find drug dogs patrolling and sniffing at the festival’s entrance, augmenting the familiar pat-down and search process. “It’s very difficult as a producer of large-scale events to control the decisions that people are making prior to even entering the show,” Jennifer Forkish, Vice President of Communications for Insomniac Events, which runs Electric Daisy Carnival, tells The Fader. “If we could stop everyone from making poor choices, we would. But we can’t.”
Lack of law enforcement at Electric Zoo has never been the problem. Even then-mayor Michael Bloomberg in 2013 said the Electric Zoo had “as good procedures as we could think of.” And there were no shortages of arrests at the other shows that drew headlines: at the Las Vegas event 29 people were arrested and at the two-day L.A. festival, more than 150 people were.
So festival promoters are looking for other ways to stem the idea of drug abuse at their events.
Dr. Andrew Bazos, Chairman of the SFX Medical and Safety Committee, is pushing to enhance two non-security related measures that have worked in Europe: harm-reduction and medical. Both the Electric Zoo and Electric Daisy Carnival are on board, handing out water, providing cool-down areas and hiring medical workers to provide discreet aid to anyone that needs it. They’re also investing in making sure everybody is 18 or older, as many of the victims of late have been minors.
As Robbie Kowal of SunsetSF promotions puts it, “There’s no security measure you can take when a kid who’s ignorant does something he shouldn’t before he walks in. So we have to educate them how to do these things safely.”
Santa Fe is Changing the Rules in the War on Drugs
According to Santa Fe police captain, Jermone Sanchez, cops are “chasing the same people over and over again,” since there’s a repeat cast of opiate addicts committing 100 percent of the city’s burglaries and other property crimes.
So what is the southwest city doing to reduce the number of repeat offenders?
Back in July 2013, the city voted to launch the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (or LEAD).The pilot initiative involves the Santa Fe police department, the district attorney’s office and public defenders, City Hall, various nonprofits and the Drug Policy Alliance of New Mexico.
Under this progressive program, which is already at work in Seattle, Wash., instead of becoming prisoners, people arrested for low-level drug offenses are given the option of becoming a “client” before they’re booked.
These clients are then assigned a case manager that offers an individualized regimen of not only “drug treatment, but also housing, transportation, and even employment support programs,” according to the Nation. Since initiating the program this April, Santa Fe has enrolled 10 offenders in LEAD.
Interestingly, participants don’t get in trouble for relapsing, and while they can be thrown out of the program, that will only occur if they commit a serious crime, reports the Nation.
Emily Kaltenback, state director of the Drug Policy Alliance, first proposed getting addicts into comprehensive treatment instead of constantly cramming up the courts and jail; she’s since won over the collaborative support of the “Santa Fe Police Department, City Hall, nonprofit service providers, the District Attorney’s office, and public defenders.”
Sanchez and Kaltenbach both believe that this program and ones like it are the best chance at overcoming the societal hardships drugs create. It also doesn’t hurt that the Santa Fe Community Foundation also thinks that LEAD could eliminate half of the $1.5 million it currently spends on the drug war.
Already, the City Council pledged to spend $300,000 on the program over the next three years, and new training for police officers begins this month.
The buzz of LEAD has made it to the east coast, too, with New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio recently announcing the start of the Public Health Diversion Center to route low-level offenders into treatment, health and welfare services instead of jail.
Safer streets on a lower budget? Count us in.
Meet a Former Big-City Police Chief Who Wants to Turn American Law Enforcement on Its Head
Past behavior doesn’t always predict future behavior. Norm Stamper is a case in point. Stamper was the Seattle Police Chief in 1999, when hundreds of people protested the World Trade Organization meeting. Under Stamper’s direction the police opted to disperse the protesters with tear gas. The tactics resulted in Stamper’s resignation and prompted him to begin a period of “very painful learning,” he told Sarah Stuteville of Seattle Globalist. He told her that using chemical agents to disperse the protesters was “the worst decision” of his career. Ever since, Stamper has been studying law enforcement in other countries to find techniques and ideas that could be effective for the American justice system.
In his book Breaking Rank, Stamper advocates some controversial law-enforcement ideas, including legalizing drugs, abolishing the death penalty, and relying more on citizens for enforcement than police. He told Stuteville that the drug war has incarcerated far too many people, especially minority men. “We’ve got the drug war raging since 1971 and pitting police against low-level, nonviolent drug offenders, creating natural animosity and tension between police and the community—in particular young people, poor people and people of color,” he says, pointing to Portugal, which decriminalized drugs in 2001, resulting in a decrease in drug use and overdose deaths.
Stamper says we can learn from communities in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, where women gather to bang pots and pans outside the homes of men who abuse women, creating a ruckus to publicly shame the men and raise awareness of the problem. “I think we should return to the earliest days of primitive law enforcement,” he told Stuteville, believing that America can “have citizens that are attuned to, and actually carrying out, a public safety role.”
MORE: This Judge Figured Out How to Keep People Out of Prison By Treating Them Like His Own Children