Ethan Brown Book Review By www.stopthedrugwar.org

When a Baltimore hustler clothing line manufacturer and barber named Rodney Bethea released a straight-to-DVD documentary about life on the mean streets of West Baltimore back in 2004 in a bid to further the hip-hop careers of some of his street-savvy friends, he had no idea "Stop Fucking Snitching, Vol. I" (better known simply as "Stop Snitching") would soon become a touchstone in a festering conflict over drugs and crime on the streets of America and what to do about it.

In a steadily rising crescendo of concern that reached a peak earlier this year when CBS' 60 Minutes ran a segment on the stop snitching phenomenon, police, politicians and prosecutors from across the country, but especially the big cities of the East Coast, lamented the rise of the stop snitching movement. Describing it as nothing more than witness intimidation by thugs out to break the law and get away with it, they charged that "stop snitching" was perverting the American justice system.

Not surprisingly, the view was a little different from the streets. Thanks largely to the war on drugs and the repressive legal apparatus ginned up to prosecute it, the traditional mistrust of police and the criminal justice system by poor, often minority, citizens has sharpened into a combination of disdain, despair, and defiance that identifies snitching -- or "informing" or "cooperating," if one wishes to be more diplomatic -- as a means of perpetuating an unjust system on the backs of one's friends and neighbors.

At least that's the argument Ethan Brown makes rather convincingly in "Snitch." According to Brown, the roots of the stop snitching movement can be traced directly to the draconian drug war legislation of the mid-1980s, when the introduction of mandatory minimums and harsh federal sentencing guidelines -- five grams of crack can get you five years in federal prison -- led to a massive increase in the federal prison population and a desperate scramble among low-level offenders to do anything to avoid years, if not decades, behind bars.

The result, Brown writes, has been a "cottage industry of cooperators" who will say whatever they think prosecutors want to hear and repeat their lies on the witness stand in order to win a "5K" motion from prosecutors, meaning they have offered "substantial assistance" to the government and are eligible for a downward departure from their guidelines sentence. Such practices are perverse when properly operated -- they encourage people to roll over on anyone they can to avoid prison time -- but approach the downright criminal when abused.

And, as Brown shows in chapter after chapter of detailed examples, abuse of the system appears almost the norm. In one case Brown details, a violent cooperator ended up murdering a well-loved Richmond, Virginia, family. In another, the still unsolved death of Baltimore federal prosecutor Richard Luna, the FBI seems determined to obscure the relationship between Luna and another violent cooperator. In still another unsolved murder, that of rapper Tupac Shakur, Brown details the apparent use of snitches to frame a man authorities suspect knows more about the killing than he is saying. In perhaps the saddest chapter, he tells the story of Euka Washington, a poor Chicago man now doing life in prison as a major Iowa crack dealer. He was convicted solely on the basis of uncorroborated and almost certainly false testimony from cooperators.

The system is rotten and engenders antipathy toward the law, Brown writes. The ultimate solution, he says, is to change the federal drug and sentencing laws, but he notes how difficult that can be, especially when Democrats are perpetually fearful of being Willy Hortoned every time they propose a reform. The current glacial progress of bills that would address one of the most egregious drug war injustices, the crack-powder cocaine sentencing disparity, is a sad case in point.

Brown addresses the quickness with which police and politicians blamed the stop snitching movement for increases in crime, but calls that a "distraction from law enforcement failures." It's much easier for cops and politicians to blame the streets than to take the heat for failing to prosecute cases and protect witnesses, and it's more convenient to blame the street than to notice rising income equality and a declining economy.

While Brown doesn't appear to want to throw the drug war baby out with the snitching bathwater, he does make a few useful suggestions for beginning to change the way the drug war is prosecuted. Instead of blindly going after dealers by weight, he argues, following UCLA professor Mark Kleiman, target those who engage in truly harmful behavior. That will not only make communities safer by ridding them of violent offenders, it will reduce the pressure to cooperate by low-level offenders as police attention and resources shift away from them.

Cooperating witnesses also need greater scrutiny, limits need to be put on 5K motions, cooperator testimony must be corroborated, and perjuring cooperators should be prosecuted, Brown adds. Too bad he doesn't have much to say about what to do with police and prosecutors who knowingly rely on dishonest snitches.

"It was never meant to intimidate people from calling the cops," Rodney Bethea said of his DVD, "and it was never directed at civilians. If your grandmother calls the cops on people who are dealing drugs on her block, she's supposed to do that because she's not living that lifestyle. When people say 'stop snitching' on the DVD, they're referring to criminals who lead a criminal life who make a profit from criminal activities... What we're saying is you have to take responsibility for your actions. When it comes time for you to pay, don't not want to pay because that is part of what you knew you were getting into in the first place. Stop Snitching is about taking it back to old-school street values, old-school street rules."

Playing by the old-school rules would be a good thing for street hustlers. It would also be a good thing for the federal law enforcement apparatus. It's an open question which group is going to get honorable first. (Click here to subscribe to my feed!)

Drug War Chronicle Book Review: "Snitch: Informants, Cooperators, and the Corruption of Justice," by Ethan Brown

New Orleans is Prime Example of US's Failed Drug War

The following article was written by Ethan Brown:

Drug policy chiefs have had few concrete successes in convincing the public or policymakers to retrench in the decades-long drug war. But when the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) held its international Drug Policy Reform conference in New Orleans recently there was the sense that its time - and place - were finally right.

Just a few days before the conference kicked off at the Astor Crowne Plaza in the French Quarter, the November 27 issue of Rolling Stone featured a sprawling, 15,000-word investigation by Ben Wallace-Wells into the US failed drug policy called How America Lost the War on Drugs.

Though anti-drug war broadsides are about as common in Rolling Stone as paeans to the late Hunter S Thompson, Wells' piece was unusually effective because it was not about the unappreciated pleasures of psychedelia but instead a methodical assessment of the high costs and low benefits of highly-punitive drug policies employed by the US.

Indeed, in praising the piece as the "smartest drug story of the year," Slate's Jack Shafer compared Wells to "an auditor called in to assess the wreck of a Fortune 500 company". And there could certainly be no more appropriate place for the Drug Policy Alliance to bring its anti-prohibitonist message than New Orleans - Louisiana has the highest incarceration rate in the US, yet still has still has extraordinarily high levels of drug use, drug dealing and drug related homicide.

Unsurprisingly, it was a pair of panel discussions about the flourishing of the drug trade and collapse of the criminal justice system in New Orleans - Drug cultures in post-Katrina New Orleans and Post-Katrina, can New Orleans afford to keep fighting the failed 'war on drugs?' - that yielded the deepest and most unexpected insights.

A team of sociologists and criminologists with the National Development and Research Institutes (NDRI), a New York-based non-profit research and educational organisation which conducts studies in public health and criminal justice policy, provided near-novelistic accounts of the changes in the drug business in New Orleans since the storm.

Interviews with more than 100 drug dealers and users in New Orleans and Katrina turned up stories like: white crystal meth cookers instructing black crack dealers on how to cook up the drug on their kitchen stoves; an explosion in heroin use and availability that has resulted in the drug being consumed in all manner of strange and fascinating ways from heroin-laced gumbo sold for $10 a cup, to tightly-rolled marijuana blunts packed with the drug; dealers from storm-wracked neighborhoods moving into surrounding areas and clashing with established dealers (this may go far in explaining the current murder epidemic in New Orleans); and, perhaps most disturbingly, thousands of "emancipated youths" (teenagers returning to New Orleans to live on their own, with absolutely no parental supervision) entering into the drug game in order to support themselves financially.

The NDRI team also catalogued the criminal justice meltdown in New Orleans in devastating detail, from the immediate aftermath of the storm when few parts were up and running to today, when they are operating yet highly dysfunctional.

Soon after the storm receded, a makeshift court and jail was set up at the New Orleans Amtrak station, dubbed "Camp Amtrak" by local law enforcement officials. Working conditions at "Camp Amtrak" were so horrendous that the district attorney actually worked from the station's gift shop. Since then, the DA has worked in temporary quarters on Poydras Street in downtown New Orleans and has struggled to keep up with the surge in robbery, murder and drug cases.

In 2006, the city infamously released 3,000 suspects under Article 701 of the Louisiana Code of Criminal Procedure, and this year has not been much better - there were 580 so-called 701 releases in January alone. The sense among hustlers that there is a near-total lack of consequences for their actions has actually eliminated employment in at least one level of the drug business according to the DPRI sociologists and criminologists.

Before Katrina, drug dealers would use intermediaries to get product to customers who wouldn't enter certain neighborhoods (for example, the French Quarter visitor looking for cocaine who didn't want to venture into predominantly black neighborhoods like Treme or Mid-City was served by an intermediary).

Since the storm, dealers have grown so bold that they sell directly to just about anyone on the streets, a big break in tradition in the drug business - particularly crack - in which selling to unfamiliar customers is verboten as they often turn out to be informants or undercover cops. "The dealer does not think there is any likelihood of arrest or conviction," explained DPRI's Stanley Hoogerwerf, "so he has eliminated the intermediary, who is now added to the ranks of unemployed in New Orleans".

Interestingly, as described by the DPRI team, the plight of the post-Katrina street hustler - stressed out by the loss of their place of residence and skyrocketing living expenses ranging from higher heating bills to rent - is remarkably similar to the average overburdened New Orleanian. That strain, unsurprisingly, is soothed by a boom in demand for prescription pills like Xanax and Valium which are increasingly sold by New Orleans hustlers along with the stable of illicit substances like cocaine, meth and marijuana.

Indeed, New Orleans-based rapper Lil Wayne had a huge hit this year with his woozy ode to sedatives I Feel Like Dying. In the song, Wayne rhapsodises about being a prisoner behind "Xanax bars" (high dosage pills of Xanax are dubbed "bars" on the streets because they resemble miniature chocolate bars).

Given the widespread abuse of illegal substances (and the illegal use of legal substances) the options for in-patient rehab in New Orleans are surprisingly sparse. Else Pedersen-Wasson, executive director of substance abuse treatment centre Bridge House, explained on the separate discussion panel that the few in-patient rehab beds in the city are quickly filled when they (rarely) become available, indeed, by one estimate there are just 200 such beds in all of New Orleans.

It would be comforting to think that New Orleans is uniquely dysfunctional, unfortunately, however, the criminal neglect that characterises the state of the criminal justice system in New Orleans - huge resources allocated toward arrest and incarceration while rehabilitation is left high and dry - is mirrored across the country.

That's precisely what made the DPA's message of treating drugs as a public health rather than criminal justice issue so powerful, even though the conference itself could have used more purely analytical voices like Leap (Law Enforcement Against Prohibition), who offered stories at several panels about making waves of arrests and then realising that they'd made little or no dent in the drug trade.

Coincidentally, on the second day of the conference, the justice department released a report stating that there were approximately 2.38 million people incarcerated in state and federal facilities as of 2006. Of those incarcerated, 905,600 are African-American, an all-time high.

Yet, as the wave of arrests and incarceration crests, there are signs that the tide may be turning against US drug policy. Virginia Democratic Senator Jim Webb recently held hearings on mass incarceration in which he proclaimed that "with the world's largest prison population, our prisons test the limits of our democracy and push the boundaries of our moral identity".

At a DPA conference panel called Black America: The debate within, Brown University economics professor Glenn Loury enthusiastically praised Webb's fearlessness on such a politically unappealing issue to rapturous applause from the packed ballroom.

Few politicians, Loury said wryly, are "in a rush to declare the drug war a failure". Perhaps the increasingly glaring policy failures of the drug war in New Orleans and in the rest of the country will cause other lawmakers to follow Webb's brave lead. (Click here to subscribe to my feed!)