Governor Paterson's office says negotiations with state lawmakers on a bill to reform the Rockefeller-era drug laws are "nearing a successful completion and reflect the governor's core principle to focus on treatment rather than punishment." Yesterday's progress came on the same day that hundreds of protesters demonstrated outside Paterson's midtown office to demand the laws' full repeal. Drug law reform has been on Paterson's agenda for many years; as a State Senator in 2002 he was arrested outside the very same building, during a protest when Pataki was governor.
According to the Times, the agreement being finalized would grant judges the authority to send first-time nonviolent offenders to treatment in all but the most serious felony drug offenses. (The Rockefeller-era Drug Laws require mandatory minimum sentences of one year for possessing even small amounts of narcotics.) Offenders would have to plead guilty in order to be sent to treatment. The Times Union reports that courts have been successfully experimenting with the treatment option since the mid '90s, and New York's drug courts now admit 2,600 new felony offenders each year, a small fraction of the 43,000 new felony drug arrests that come through the system.
Some wonder how the state budget will pay for the additional treatment, which could reach $80 million. But reform could save money over time because sending offenders to treatment is less expensive than spending $45,000 a year to lock them up, the Times reports. And the deal would also allow an unspecified number of drug offenders who are currently in prison to apply to have their sentences commuted, something that wasn't included in the compromise bill originally proposed by Paterson.
Senator Eric Schneiderman, a Manhattan Democrat who has helped lead the effort in Albany, expressed confidence that the newly Democratic Senate would soon pass reform, telling the Times, "It’s no secret the Senate’s old majority was the primary barrier to reforming our drug laws. But this is one of the reasons we fought so hard to take the majority. This is what our supporters have expected us to do."
