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| Minnesota drug laws toughest in region |
| By Minneapolis Star Tribune |
| Published: 01/26/2004 |
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Minnesota taxpayers could save up to $30 million a year if nonviolent drug offenders now flooding state prisons in unprecedented proportions were sent to treatment instead, a new report to the Legislature suggests. The report, by the Minnesota Sentencing Guidelines Commission, is likely to spur another round of emotional debate over the fiscal and social effects of state policies that sent a record 938 drug offenders to prison in 2002, the last year for which figures have been compiled. According to the report, Minnesota's drug-sentencing laws are more severe -- sometimes startlingly so -- than those of many other states, especially in the Upper Midwest. As a result, drug offenders admitted to Minnesota prisons in 2002 outnumbered those incarcerated for violent or property crimes, the first time that has occurred. Further, the average prison term for drugs -- more than four years, twice what it was in 1988 -- was longer than that for nondrug crimes. And among all 12,978 felons sentenced in Minnesota in 2002 -- 3,424 of them for drug crimes -- a higher percentage of drug offenders went to prison compared with nondrug criminals. Combatting illegal drugs, mainly cocaine, methamphetamine and marijuana, has begun to dominate criminal justice in Minnesota only in the last few years. As recently as 1990, drug offenders made up only 9 percent of the state prison population; now they are 23 percent. Stiff drug penalties enacted as crack cocaine use spread in the 1980s, and a court ruling that required equal treatment of crack and powder cocaine crimes, produced "a combination of intended and unintended consequences" for drug enforcement, the report said. "In addition, reductions in treatment resources at both the state and local levels have contributed to a growing number of drug offenders recycling through our criminal justice system," the report noted. |
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