NY Drug Law Refoms Kick In: Treatment Stressed
Newsday
ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — Hundreds of low-level drug offenders in New York prisons became eligible Wednesday for shortened sentences or release under recent changes in state law.
Gov. David Paterson and lawmakers agreed in April to revise the Rockefeller-era drug laws, once among the harshest in the nation and in the vanguard of a movement more than 30 years ago toward mandatory prison terms. They argued that lower-level offenders would be better served by addiction treatment rather than prison.
"Under the Rockefeller Drug Laws, we did not treat the people who were addicted. We locked them up," Paterson said Wednesday at the Brooklyn Court House. "Families were broken, money was wasted, and we continued to wrestle with a statewide drug problem."
2 comments:
The politicians and experts just dont get it, to stop the flow of illegal drugs in this country is to legalize them. Discontinue the so called drug war, saving millions of dollars annually as well as lowering the prison population by the thousands. Instead of mandatory prison terms for addiction, make it mandatory treatment centers, which can be paid for by the savings of all the closed prisons.djw
If we had half the bed space for rehabilitation of addiction as we do for incarceration, both our prison problems and our drug problems would benefit significantly, as well as our budgetary problems.
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