New York Voting to Reduce Drug Sentences:

The New York Times reports:

  After years of false starts, state lawmakers voted Tuesday evening to reduce the steep mandatory prison sentences given to people convicted of drug crimes in New York State, sanctions considered among the most severe in the nation.
  The push to soften the so-called Rockefeller drug laws came after a nearly decade-long campaign to ease the drug penalties instituted in the 1970’s that put some low-level first-time drug offenders behind bars for sentences ranging from 15 years to life.
  Under the changes passed Tuesday, which Gov. George E. Pataki said he would sign, the sentence for those same offenders would be reduced to 8 to 20 years in prison. The law will allow more than 400 inmates serving lengthy prison terms on those top counts to apply to judges to get out of jail early.

  Good for them. I am against drug legalization, but mandatory-term sentences are usually bad news, and high mandatories for drug crimes are often the worst of the lot. My sense is that in the case of drug crimes, the imposition of severe sentences has little additional deterrent effect. Addicts are hard to deter. Dealers get locked away for a lot longer, but someone else replaces them to meet the consumer demand. On the whole, greater penalties should have a marginal effect on the price and availability of drugs — and higher price may lessen demand — but they do so at a very high price to defendants, their families, and the state that has to pay for prison. When a defendant can get a more severe sentence for dealing drugs then for committing a brutal violent crime, something is out of whack.