[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 84 (Tuesday, June 17, 1997)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1235-E1237]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




          RAND STUDY QUESTIONS CURRENT DRUG SENTENCING POLICY

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. BARNEY FRANK

                            of massachusetts

                    in the house of representatives

                         Tuesday, June 17, 1997

  Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Speaker, I have believed for some 
time that our policy for mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent 
drug offenses at the Federal level represents a poor policy choice, 
given the resources available to us. A uniform mandatory minimum policy 
results in unfair sentences to some and an unwise expenditure of funds 
in many other cases, if our goal is in fact to reduce drug use and 
drug-related crime.
  I was therefore interested to read of the recent study by researchers 
at the RAND Drug Policy Research Center. Jonathan Caulkins, C. Peter 
Rydell, William Schwabe, and James Chiesa report that, ``mandatory 
minimums produce the smallest bang for the buck by far'', compared to 
conventional enforcement and treatment of heavy drug users. Indeed, 
their conclusion is that, ``treatment of heavy drug users produces the 
biggest bang of all.''
  Because of the importance of this as a public policy question, and 
because I believe that this RAND research report confirms that we are 
making a serious error in our current allocation of resources in drug 
policy, I ask that the RAND Drug Policy Research Center brief on 
mandatory minimum drug sentences' cost effective be printed here.


       Washington, DC May 12.--If cutting drug consumption and 
     drug-related crime are the nation's prime drug control 
     objectives, then the mandatory minimum drug sentencing laws 
     in force at the federal level and in most states are not the 
     way to get there.
       this is the key finding of Mandatory Minimum Drug 
     Sentences: Throwing Away the Key or the Taxpayer's Money?, a 
     new RAND study that provides the first quantitative analysis 
     of how successful these measures are in achieving what 
     Director Barry McCaffrey of the Office of National Drug 
     Control Policy has called ``our central purpose and mission--
     reducing illicit drug use and its consequences.''
       Researchers Jonathan P. Caulkins, C. Peter Rydell, William 
     Schwebe and James Chiesa estimate the cost-effectiveness of 
     extended sentences in reducing cocaine consumption and crime, 
     compare the results to those for two other drug control 
     strategies, and show that mandatory minimums produce the 
     smallest bang for the buck by far. Conventional enforcement 
     (meaning

[[Page E1236]]

     more drug dealer arrests, confiscations, prosecutions and 
     standard-length incarcerations) is a substantially better 
     investment. Treatment of heavy drug users producers the 
     biggest bang of all.
       Mandatory minimum drug sentencing laws, dating largely to 
     the 1980s, have been among the most popular crime-fighting 
     measures of recent years. Details vary with the jurisdiction, 
     but all of these statutes stipulate a sentence of specified 
     length given certain triggering criteria, notably the 
     quantity of an illicit drug possessed at time of arrest. For 
     example, federal law requires judges to impose a sentence of 
     at least five years for anyone convicted of possessing half a 
     kilogram of cocaine powder or five grams of crack cocaine.
       Caulkins and his colleagues begin their analysis by 
     estimating the effects of spending an additional $1 million 
     on each of several alternative strategies over a 15-year 
     period. The results:
       Spending the money on mandatory minimum-length sentences 
     for a representative national sample of drug dealers can 
     reduce total national cocaine consumption by 13 kilograms. 
     Spending it on conventional enforcement against such dealers 
     cuts use by 27 kilograms. Spending it to treat heavy users 
     reduces consumption by over 100 kilograms. A principal reason 
     that long sentences are not more cost-effective is the high 
     cost of incarceration.
       If the analysis is restricted to drug dealers at a somewhat 
     higher level--those prosecuted by the federal government and 
     in possession of enough drugs to trigger a federal mandatory-
     minimum sentence--the numbers change but the rankings remain 
     the same. In fact, mandatory minimums are the least cost-
     effective way to reduce consumption under any set of 
     conditions save one: They could be efficient if judges were 
     given leeway to apply them only to certain very high-level 
     dealers. Unfortunately, these laws are not selective and do 
     not allow judges to use discretion.
       Dollar for dollar, conventional enforcement efforts reduce 
     70 percent more crimes against persons than longer sentences. 
     Treatment reduces about 10 times more serious crime than 
     conventional enforcement and 15 times more than mandatory 
     minimums. Explanation: Most drug-related crime is 
     economically motivated and associated with the amount of 
     money flowing through the cocaine market. Incarceration has 
     little effect on this flow because it suppresses drug use by 
     driving up drug prices. In contrast, treatment removes some 
     users from the market altogether (both those who are in 
     treatment and the minority who do not relapse afterwards).
       To their proponents, the certainty and severity of 
     mandatory minimums ensure that drug criminals will be 
     punished, be kept off the streets for extended periods, and 
     be examples that deter others. Critics protest that the laws 
     foreclose discretionary judgment where it is most needed and 
     often result in unjust punishment or even racial bias. In 
     mid-April, the Supreme Court refused to hear a claim that the 
     distinction between cocaine powder and crack amounts is 
     discriminatory because crack arrestees are predominantly 
     african-american. Two weeks ago, the U.S. sentencing 
     commission recommended reducing the disparities between 
     sentences for possession of crack and powder cocaine.
       The RAND study focuses on what is arguably the most 
     problematic substance--cocaine--and provides quantitative 
     answers to a different but fundamental question: How 
     effective are mandatory minimums relative to other means of 
     achieving the nation's drug control goals?
       ``Our results indicate that we would make greater drug 
     control progress by sentencing more dealers to standard 
     prison terms than by sentencing fewer dealers to longer, 
     mandatory terms,'' summarizes study leader Caulkins. ``They 
     also suggest that treatment should receive higher priority 
     than it does today. But the shift toward treatment should not 
     be pushed too far. After all, it often takes enforcement to 
     provide willing clients for treatment.''
       This research was supported by a gift from Florida 
     businessman Richard B. Wolf and by funding from The Ford 
     Foundation and was carried out by RAND's Drug Policy Research 
     Center. RAND is a private, not-for-profit organization that 
     helps improve public policy through research and analysis.
                                  ____

       Mandatory minimum sentencing laws have been among the more 
     popular crime-fighting measures of recent years. Such laws 
     require that a judge impose a sentence of at least a 
     specified length if certain criteria are met. For example, a 
     person convicted by a federal court of possessing half a 
     kilogram or more of cocaine powder must be sentenced to at 
     least five years in prison.
       Mandatory minimums have enjoyed strong bipartisan support. 
     To proponents, their certainty and severity help ensure that 
     incarceration's goals will be achieved. Those goals include 
     punishing the convicted and keeping them from committing more 
     crimes for a period of time, as well as deterring others not 
     in prison from committing similar crimes. Critics, however, 
     believe that mandatory minimums foreclose discretionary 
     judgment where it may most be needed, and they fear these 
     laws result in instances of unjust punishment.
       These are all important considerations, but mandatory 
     minimums associated with drug crimes may also be viewed as a 
     means of achieving the nation's drug control objectives. As 
     such, who do they compare with other means? Do they 
     contribute to the central objective--decreasing the nation's 
     drug consumption and related consequences--at a cost that 
     compares favorably with other approaches? Jonathan P. 
     Caulkins, C. Peter Rydell, William L. Schwabe, and James 
     Chiesa have estimated how successful mandatory minimum 
     sentences are, relative to other control strategies, at 
     reducing drug consumption and drug-related crime.
       The DPRC researchers focused on cocaine, which many view as 
     the most problematic drug in America today. They took two 
     approaches to mathematically model the market for cocaine and 
     arrived at the same basic conclusion: Mandatory minimum 
     sentences are not justifiable on the basis of cost-
     effectiveness at reducing cocaine consumption or drug-related 
     crime. Mandatory minimums reduce cocaine consumption less per 
     million taxpayer dollars spent than spending the same amount 
     on enforcement under the previous sentencing regime. And 
     either enforcement approach reduces drug consumption less, 
     per million dollars spent, than putting heavy users through 
     treatment programs. Mandatory minimums are also less cost-
     effective than either alternative at reducing cocaine-related 
     crime. A principal reason for these findings is the high cost 
     of incarceration.


     Reducing Consumption: More Enforcement Against Typical Dealers

       Caulkins, Rydell, and their colleagues first estimated the 
     cost-effectiveness of additional expenditures on enforcement 
     against the average drug dealer apprehended in the United 
     States (whether that apprehension is by federal, state, or 
     local authorities). Increased enforcement places additional 
     costs on dealers, which they pass along to cocaine consumers 
     in the form of higher prices. Studies have shown that higher 
     cocaine prices discourage consumption. By mathematically 
     modeling how cocaine market demand and supply respond to 
     price, the researchers were able to estimate the changes in 
     total cocaine consumption over 15 years for an additional 
     million dollars invested in different cocaine control 
     strategies. These consumption changes, discounted to present 
     value, are shown by the first two bars in Figure 1.
       Those bars show the results of spending a million dollars 
     \1\ on additional enforcement against a representative sample 
     of drug dealers. As shown by the first bar, if that money 
     were used to extend to federal mandatory minimum lengths the 
     sentences of dealers who would have been arrested anyway, 
     U.S. cocaine consumption would be reduced by almost 13 
     kilograms.\2\ If, however, the money were used to arrest, 
     confiscate the assets of, prosecute, and incarcerate more 
     dealers (for prison terms of conventional length), cocaine 
     consumption would be reduced by over 27 kilograms. As a 
     point of comparison, spending the million dollars to treat 
     heavy users would reduce cocaine consumption by a little 
     over 100 kilograms (rightmost bar).
       The results from spending an additional million dollars can 
     be extrapolated to multiples thereof. A case can thus be made 
     for shifting resources from longer sentences to a broader mix 
     of enforcement measures. A case might also be made for 
     shifting resources to treatment, although legislators might 
     find such a shift less palatable. In any event, extrapolation 
     is valid only up to a point. These results certainly do not 
     support shifting all drug control resources from one approach 
     to another, e.g., from enforcement to treatment. Very large 
     changes in enforcement levels or in the number of persons 
     treated would change cocaine supply and demand relations in 
     ways that are not predictable with much confidence.


  REDUCING CONSUMPTION: MORE ENFORCEMENT AGAINST HIGHER-LEVEL DEALERS

       The first two bars in Figure 1 represent enforcement 
     approaches applied to a representative sample of drug 
     dealers. Perhaps mandatory minimum sentences would be more 
     cost-effective if they were applied only to higher-level 
     dealers, who make more money and thus have more to lose from 
     intensive enforcement. To approximate such a restriction, 
     Caulkins and his colleagues limited the set of dealers 
     analyzed to those prosecuted at the federal level who possess 
     enough drugs to trigger a federal mandatory minimum sentence. 
     Again, they analyzed how costs imposed on dealers influence 
     cocaine market demand and supply. The results are shown in 
     the dark bars in Figure 1.
       Spending a million dollars on mandatory minimum sentences 
     for higher-level dealers does indeed have a bigger effect on 
     cocaine consumption than spending the same amount on either 
     enforcement approach against typical dealers. Nonetheless, 
     against any given type of dealer (or at any given level of 
     government), mandatory minimums are less cost-effective than 
     conventional enforcement. Moreover, although federal 
     mandatory minimums do better relative to treating heavy users 
     than do longer sentences for all dealers, treatment is still 
     more cost-effective.
       Why is conventional enforcement more cost-effective than 
     mandatory minimums? Drug enforcement imposes costs on dealers 
     through arrest and conviction, which includes seizure of 
     drugs and other assets, and through incarceration, which 
     involves loss of income. It turns out that, per dollar spent, 
     the cost burden from seizures is greater. A million dollars 
     spent extending sentences

[[Page E1237]]

     thus imposes less cost on dealers--less than a million 
     dollars spent on conventional enforcement, which includes 
     asset seizures.\3\


                     REDUCING COCAINE-RELATED CRIME

       Many Americans are worried about the crime associated with 
     cocaine production, distribution, and use. Working with data 
     on the causes of drug-related crime, Caulkins and his 
     colleagues estimated the crime reduction benefits of the 
     various alternatives. They found no difference between 
     conventional enforcement and mandatory minimums in relation 
     to property crime. Conventional enforcement, however, should 
     reduce crimes against persons by about 70 percent more than 
     mandatory minimums. But treatment should reduce serious 
     crimes (against both property and persons) the most per 
     million dollars spent--on the order of fifteen times as much 
     as would the incarceration alternatives.
       Why is treatment so much better? Most drug-related crime is 
     economically motivated--undertaken, for example, to procure 
     money to support a habit or to settle scores between rival 
     dealers. The level of economically motivated crime is related 
     to the amount of money flowing through the cocaine market. 
     When a treated dealer stays off drugs, that means less money 
     flowing into the market--therefore, less crime. When a 
     dealer facing greater enforcement pressure raises his 
     price to compensate for the increased risk, buyers will 
     reduce the amount of cocaine they purchase. Money flow 
     equals price times quantity bought. Which effect 
     predominates--the rise in price or the drop in 
     consumption? The best evidence suggests that they cancel 
     each other out, so the total revenue flowing through the 
     cocaine market stays about the same. The effect of the 
     enforcement alternatives is therefore limited almost 
     entirely to the relatively small number of crimes that are 
     the direct result of drug consumption--crimes ``under the 
     influence.''


          SENSITIVITY OF THE RESULTS TO CHANGES IN ASSUMPTIONS

       The values shown in Figure 1 are dependent, of course, on 
     various assumptions the researchers made. If the assumptions 
     are changed, the values change. As an example, the results 
     are dependent on the time horizon of interest to those making 
     decisions about cocaine control strategy. Figure 1, for 
     example, ignores any benefits and costs accruing more than 15 
     years beyond program initiation. A 15-year horizon is a 
     typical one for analyzing public-policy effects. But what if 
     that horizon were closer?
       Figure 2 shows the relative cost-effectiveness of treatment 
     and the enforcement alternatives against typical dealers, 
     analyzed when time horizons are set at various points from 1 
     to 15 years. At 15 years, the lines match the heights of the 
     two short bars and the tallest bar in Figure 1. As the 
     horizon is shortened, treatment looks worse, because 
     treatment's costs, which accrue immediately, remain, while 
     the benefits, which accrue as long as treated individuals 
     reduce their consumption, are cut back. If the horizon is 
     made short enough, long sentences look better, because the 
     costs of additional years of imprisonment are ignored, while 
     the benefits remain. Those benefits, again, are the cocaine 
     price increase and consumption decrease that occur as soon as 
     the imprisonment risk increases. The time horizon must be 
     shortened to three years before long sentences look 
     preferable to additional conventional enforcement, and to 
     little more than two years before they look preferable to 
     treatment. Hence, longer sentences for typical drug dealers 
     appear cost-effective only to the highly myopic.
       More generally, large departures from the assumptions 
     underlying the analysis are required for mandatory minimums 
     to be the most cost-effective approach. Figure 3, for 
     example, displays departures from two key assumptions 
     underlying the results in Figure 1: that it costs the federal 
     government $20,000 to arrest a dealer and that a dealer wants 
     additional drug sales income amounting to $85,000 for risking 
     an additional year of imprisonment. These two assumed values 
     are depicted by the star in Figure 3. The bounded areas and 
     labels indicate which program is the most cost-effective for 
     any combination of substitutes for those two numbers. As the 
     figure shows, mandatory minimums would be the most cost-
     effective alternative only if arrest cost were to exceed 
     $30,000 and a dealer were to value his time at over $250,000 
     per year. Such figures would typify only those dealers who 
     are both unusually difficult to arrest and at a fairly high 
     level in the cocaine trade. For dealers costing less than 
     $30,000 to arrest, cocaine control dollars would be better 
     spent on further conventional enforcement. For dealers 
     demanding less than $250,000 compensation for imprisonment 
     risk, the money would be better spent treating heavy users.
       Long sentences could thus be a smart strategy if 
     selectively applied. Unfortunately, because mandatory minimum 
     sentences are triggered by quantity of drug possessed, they 
     are not selectively applied to the highest-level dealers. 
     Such dealers often do not physically possess the drugs 
     they own and control; they hire others to carry the drugs 
     and incur the associated risk.


                               CONCLUSION

       Long sentences for serious crimes have intuitive appeal. 
     They respond to deeply held beliefs about punishment for evil 
     actions, and in many cases they ensure that, by removing a 
     criminal from the streets, further crimes that would have 
     been committed will not be. But in the case of black-market 
     crimes like drug dealing, a jailed supplier is often replaced 
     by another supplier. Limited cocaine control resources can, 
     however, be profitably directed toward other important 
     objectives--reducing cocaine consumption and the violence and 
     theft that accompany the cocaine market. If those are the 
     goals, more can be achieved by spending additional money 
     arresting, prosecuting, and sentencing dealers to standard 
     prison terms than by spending it sentencing fewer dealers to 
     longer, mandatory terms. The DPRC researchers found an 
     exception in the case of the highest-level dealers, where 
     sentences of mandatory minimum length appear to be the most 
     cost-effective approach. However, it is difficult to identify 
     those dealers solely by quantity of drug possessed. It might 
     be easier to identify them if, in passing sentence, the 
     criminal justice system could consider additional factors, 
     e.g., evidence regarding a dealer's position in the 
     distribution hierarchy. Such factors, ignored by mandatory 
     minimums, can be taken into account by judges working under 
     discretionary sentencing.


                               FOOTNOTES

     \1\ All cost calculations in this brief are in 1992 dollars. 
     To convert costs in 1992 dollars to 1996 dollars (the latest 
     year for which inflation data are available), multiply by 
     1.119. To convert kilograms of cocaine consumption reduced 
     per million 1992 dollars spent to kilograms reduced per 
     million 1996 dollars, divide by 1.119.
     \2\ Data on quantities possessed by convicted dealers are not 
     readily available below the federal level, so for typical 
     dealers, the researchers assessed, in lieu of the true 
     mandatory minimums, a program applying longer sentences to 
     all who were convicted.
     \3\ As shown in earlier RAND research, treatment is more 
     cost-effective than enforcement, even though the great 
     majority of users revert to their cocaine habit following 
     treatment. Treatment is so much cheaper than enforcement that 
     many more users can be targeted for the same amount of 
     money--so many more that the sum of the small individual 
     effects expected are larger than the effects expected from 
     enforcement.

     

                          ____________________