The total number of people committed to state prisons each year grew from 7,959 in 1980 to 25,099 in 1992, when commitments began dropping slightly. In 1997, 20,800 people were committed to prison—more than two and one half times the number committed in 1980.  

This growth trend in the total number of prison commitments is a direct function of the number of people committed for drug offenses, which increased from 886 in 1980 to 11,209 in 1992, when commitments for drug offenses began dropping slightly. The number of people committed for violent crimes remained relatively constant between 1980 and 1997, but the number committed for drug offenses skyrocketed.

The consequence of this growth in annual prison commitments driven by massive increases in the number of drug related commitments has been a five-fold increase in the size of the state prison population. When the Rockefeller Drug Laws were enacted in 1973, only 12,500 people were incarcerated in state prisons. This number more than doubled in the decade following passage of the Rockefeller Drug Laws. Last year, over 69,000 people were incarcerated in New York State prisons at a cost to the taxpayers of $30,000 per prisoner.

The taxpayers of New York State paid over $2 billion last year to house prisoners. Nearly half of those prisoners were committed for drug offenses, not predatory crimes. Of those committed for drug offenses, approximately one-quarter were convicted of simple possession, as opposed to selling drugs. Most of the people convicted of selling drugs were low level offenders who were expendable in the drug distribution system and quickly replaced

It cost the taxpayers of New York State over $265 million last year to lock up the 8,880 drug offenders sentenced under the Rockefeller Drug Laws. Taxpayers were forced to pay over $225 million to incarcerate the 7,515 low-level offenders sentenced under the Second Felony Offender Law, most of whom were minor drug offenders. The cost of incarcerating people last year who were convicted of simple drug possession exceeded $165 million.

If these expenses resulted in increased public safety, they might be worthwhile. However, the evidence is overwhelming that incarceration is the least effective and most costly strategy for reducing drug use and crime. The RAND Corporation Drug Policy Research Center, for example, recently concluded that residential drug treatment programs are 15 times more effective at reducing serious crime than mandatory minimum prison sentences.

The graph above, reprinted from the RAND Corporation’s Mandatory Minimum Drug Sentences: Throwing Away the Key or the Taxpayer’s Money?, shows that longer prison sentences are more effective than both treatment and conventional enforcement in the short term, but as a long term solution to the drug problem, longer sentences are the least effective. In fact, money spent on treatment yields dividends that compound far into the future with a smaller initial investment.

The average residential treatment program costs between $17,000 and $20,000 per participant per year. This is one-third less than the $30,000 it costs to house a state prison inmate for a year and two-thirds less than the cost of housing an inmate in a New York City jail for a year. And it is clearly money better spent.

The Physician Leadership on National Drug Policy, a bipartisan group of prominent physicians and public health officials who served in the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations, recently concluded that a dollar spent on drug treatment saves seven dollars in medical and social costs. More importantly, they found drug treatment is much more likely to reduce recidivism rates than long prison sentences.

The evidence is irrefutable. Incarcerating drug users is extremely expensive and highly ineffective. The time has come to craft a new drug policy that preserves justice, reduces harm, and eliminates wasteful spending.

At the time of the 1971 uprising in the state’s maximum security prison at Attica, New York State housed around 12,000 prisoners. A decade later, fueled in part by concern that another Attica disaster was in the making, elected officials initiated a major expansion of the state prison system, resulting in the addition of 39,651 beds between 1981 and 1996. At a cost of $100,000 per prison bed, this expansion of the prison system cost New York taxpayers approximately $4 billion dollars, plus financing and operating costs. Yet today the prisons operate at 131% of capacity, housing nearly 70,000 inmates, and the claim that more prisons are needed is frequently heard.

This "need" for new prisons, however, can be attributed largely to the harsh and disproportionate sentences mandated by the Rockefeller drug laws. Signed in 1973 by then Governor Nelson Rockefeller, these laws mandate minimum sentences for drug offenders based upon the amount of the drug involved rather than the nature of the offense. Under these laws, an individual convicted of making a $20 street sale of cocaine or heroin faces a mandatory sentence of three years to life. An individual found guilty of possessing four ounces (about the amount that would fill a salt shaker) faces fifteen years to life—the same mandatory sentence as a murderer.

With the implementation of these laws, New York State has imprisoned thousands of non-violent, low level drug offenders who would be handled much more effectively by drug treatment programs, community service, or other alternatives to incarceration. Furthermore, these more effective programs would cost considerably less than the $30,000 required to incarcerate an inmate for one year, thereby freeing up money for other purposes, including higher education.

In 1995, $4 million was cut from the Educational Opportunities Program and $93 million was cut from the State Tuition Assistance Program (TAP)—a program which helps over 264,000 New Yorkers finance a higher education. These cuts coincided with a $225 million reduction in the SUNY operating budget between 1994 and 1997. As a result of these cuts in education and the expansion of the prison system, last year New York State spent nearly twice as much on prisons as it did on the State University.

The mandatory minimums imposed by the Rockefeller drug laws are costly and damaging to our communities. Without their repeal, citizens of New York State will be forced to continue funding incarceration over education—and to sacrifice our future. Therefore, we urge our legislators to support the Aubry repeal bill (A.10303) and to restore funding for higher education, which costs less than incarceration and yields higher returns.

Governor Nelson Rockefeller was a liberal who had been booed off the stage at Republican conventions in the past for his opposition to Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and others in his party whom he considered right wing extremists. But with the re-election of Richard Nixon—the man Nelson Rockefeller vigorously opposed in the Republican primary four years earlier—Rockefeller realized he had to establish his conservative credentials if he hoped to fulfill his national political ambitions. So on that election day in 1972, at a staff meeting in the basement of his family’s mansion called to plan his 1973 legislative agenda, Nelson Rockefeller announced: "On drugs, anyone who pushes gets life in prison. And I mean life—no matter what amount. No more of this plea bargaining, parole, and probation."

Rockefeller’s proposal was opposed by nearly everyone who heard about it. His staff twice attempted to water it down when they drafted the bill, but Rockefeller wouldn’t tolerate it. The chairman of New York State’s Narcotics Addiction Control Commission also opposed the proposal, but to no avail. Legislative leaders joked that his next piece of legislation would be death for overtime parking. But because legislators feared that a vote in opposition to the bill would be perceived as a vote in favor of drug pushers, the bill passed with ease and became law on May 8, 1973. Thus was born one of the most punitive drug control measures ever codified into law in any democratic nation.

For related information, read "New York State of Mind?: Higher Education versus Prison Funding in the Empire State, 1988-1998" athttp://www.cjcj.org/jpi/nysomfront.html