A catching sickness
A look at America's sentencing system
A Plague of Prisons: The Epidemiology of Mass Incarceration in America. By Ernest Drucker. The New Press; 211 pages; $26.95. Buy from Amazon.com
IN MAY 1973 New York passed a set of laws that required judges to impose sentences of 15 years to life imprisonment for anyone convicted of selling two ounces (57 grams) or possessing four ounces of “narcotic drugs”—usually cocaine, heroin or marijuana. They came to be known as the Rockefeller laws, after New York's then-governor, Nelson Rockefeller. They sent New York's prison population soaring, from an average of fewer than 75 inmates per 100,000 New Yorkers between 1880 and 1970 to five times that rate by the end of the century. Between 1987 and 1997 drug cases accounted for 45% of new prisoners.
This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline "A catching sickness"
From the September 3rd 2011 edition
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