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Editorial See other Editorial Articles Title: Narcs, crack, and federalism What I wanted to look at was federalism. This morning's LA Times has a front page headlined article about the US Sentencing Commission in which a bunch of Washington people are going to decide whether the increased sentences for crack cocaine -- as opposed to powder cocaine -- are justified, or should be rolled back retroactively. From the article Potential beneficiaries of the proposal include Willie Mays Aikens, a former Major League Baseball star with the Kansas City Royals, who was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison in 1994 for selling 63 grams of crack to an undercover cop. Aikens' case illustrates the effect of the crack/powder divide: If the charges against him involved a similar amount of powder cocaine, he would have received a sentence of no more than 27 months. Now, if the proposal passes, he will be eligible for release in 2009, about three years earlier than his current release date, said his attorney, Margaret Love. All of which got me wondering: how are the people of these United States better off for having sent this guy away for 20 years? A lot of money was spent catching him and convicting him, and keeping him in a no possible parole condition for 20 years undoubtedly costs more than sending him to Harvard and then giving him a pension to go live in Sao Paolo Brazil or in Tierra del Fuego as a remittance man would have cost. If the taxpayer and fans of Kansas City had been consulted, would they have preferred that he be sent up the river for 20 years? Just who profited from that? Twenty years is a long and very expensive time. Understand, I am not all that sure that the 27 months he'd have got if he'd been selling powder cocaine would have been all that useful to the people of these United States. I have never tried cocaine, and I think I have only once been at a party were there was any -- I got out of there in a hurry largely because I was worried about being caught up in a bust -- but I have known several people who claim to be cocaine users. Of those I do not know a single one whose jailing would have benefitted the republic, and I think of several who were of far more service to us out of jail than they would have been inside the joint without possibility of parole. It used to be that a federal crime was a serious matter. There was a sort of apologetic air about having to use tax evasion as the only way to bust Al Capone, as if that weren't quite fair, but after all, he was a notorious criminal, Illinois wasn't going to do anything, and this was all the feds could get him on. Now it's 20 years for 63 grams (2.2 ounces of crack. Of course that provides employment to narc agents, prosecutors, court clerks, stenographers, prison guards, truck drivers who bring food to the prisons, contractors who sell food to the prisons, and lots of lawyers: but is the republic really better off with Willie Mays Aikens rotting in the joint and those people employed? Or would it be better if they had other lines of work and Willie was playing baseball? I don't believe in federal crimes for anything less than treason and terrorism. Perhaps really grand corruption, but even then it's more a state matter. Los Angeles isn't better off for federal monkeying around with local police. As to drugs, I think that ought to be left to the states. Sure, it's a federal matter to bring the stuff into the country, but once it's in here, that's another story. Let the states worry about how to allocate law enforcement resources. If the feds really have to play narcotic cops in the streets, then let them clean up the District of Columbia. When we see what a cleaned up city looks like, we can decide if it's worth the cost to have them clean up Kansas City or Los Angeles or Muscatine, Iowa, or Grand Rapids, or whatever; but the Framers never contemplated having narks and snitches play games in our city streets. The whole federal prison system ought to be dismantled. Yes, there are federal crimes and there need to be federal prisons; but they ought to be real crimes that do real harm to the republic. There was a time when bank robbery kidnapping warranted federal intervention, or at least Hoover convinced the Congress of it; but is that still true? Isn't California, which has more cops today than the feds had when they took over bank robbery and kidnapping, capable of handling such matters? Or perhaps we can have the feds called in as consultants when wanted; I can see how some major crimes are beyond the locals (although locals with state help are pretty competent compared to a lot of feds I know of). But giving the feds original jurisdiction, and making federal crimes with 20 years and no parole sentences seems a long way from what they were thinking of in that hot summer of 1787 in Philadelphia. Get the feds out of our lives. Let them show us how good they are by cleaning up the District of Columbia. Then they can come tell us what they want to do for us out here.
Poster Comment: The federal government is supposed to help us -- hah hah! I look at it as a gigantic group of people, and like all groups it is ruled by self-interest, not what is good for the nation. Oh, of course they claim what they're doing is good, but it's not. Unfortunately, governments reserve to themselves the right to use deadly force, and tries to take away that right from us.
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