On Sunday, the Washington Post Magazine ran an excellent cover story about one man out of the thousands upon thousands of low-level offenders who have served or are serving very long sentences for dealing crack cocaine. Here’s how the story begins:
ON HIS 18TH DAY OF FREEDOM, Michael Short awakened before dawn. In prison, corrections officers had paced the halls at night, jingling keys and shining flashlights. Now Mike slept fitfully, even in a king-size bed.It was a damp, gray Tuesday late in February. He slipped on a pinstriped shirt that hid his tattoos, slid his feet into shiny new loafers and rubbed coconut oil into his hair, cut razor-straight at the temples and flecked with gray. He was 36, with a basketball player’s long-legged gait and the lined brow of a man well acquainted with consequences. Standing in front of the bathroom mirror, he nervously knotted a silver-and-white tie that his girlfriend had bought him at Macy’s.
….Over breakfast, he practiced the testimony he was scheduled to deliver that afternoon before a congressional subcommittee:
My name is Michael Short. I am here because in 1992 I was sentenced for selling crack cocaine. Before that, I had never spent a day in prison. I came from a good family. I had no criminal history. I was not a violent offender. But I was sentenced to serve nearly 20 years. I was 21 years old.
The writer, Vanessa Gezari, has done a masterly job of using a compelling human story about one person’s experience to illuminate the whole issue of drug sentencing reform—including how we came to have penalties for crack cocaine offenses that are so much more severe than for any other controlled substance.
I think you’ll find it to be a really interesting and worthwhile read, at the end of which you’ll know a lot about an important issue that is deeply intertwined with the future of American incarceration policy.
BUT THERE’S MORE….
On Monday at noon, journalist Gezari participated in an online Q & A with readers. The transcript of the discussion may be found here.
Don’t you think that the judge knew Short’s background before he sentenced him? Now, twenty years later you are second-guessing the judge without as much information and with the advantage of hindsight. How many drug pushers did the judge sentence to twenty years who should be in for life for the other lives that they ruined and deaths that resulted? For every case that you think served too long, there are more that should be as long or more.
Woody, you’d have to read the piece. This has nothing to do with judges. They’ve been as hamstrung by the drug laws as anybody. It’s about our overall sentencing policy. If you read it then you’ll have more to go on, I promise. It’s a very good article, and makes more informed discussion possible, wherever one lands on the issue.
Please don’t make me read anything long.
It’s less than 8,000 words including title and subtitle.