The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Ethos of Mandatory Minimum Sentencing

This paper comes from a dissertation that investigates changing ideas and policies regarding crime, drugs, and incarceration that occurred in the last thirty years of the twentieth century using New York as a model and forerunner of national trends. In the late 1960's New York City was in the midst of a heroin problem that would soon grow to “epidemic” proportions. Over 50% of the nation's heroin users resided in New York City by 1973. High levels of street crime combined with increasing drug use and rising homicide rates to invoke widespread fear and frustration for many New Yorkers. The city was in financial crisis as deindustrialization and recession coincided with a massive drain of revenues and the flight of the middle class to the suburbs. During this time, a dramatic shift occurred in drug policy. The long-standing treatment model, which focused on addiction and viewed drug use as a public health concern, was replaced by an enforcement model, which reframed the heroin epidemic as a law enforcement issue. Changing policy regarding drug use coincided with a major philosophical shift in penology. By 1986 Americans had come to view prisons not as a place to rehabilitate, but instead, as a tool primarily for incapacitation and punishment. The watershed moment for this penal shift occurred in 1973 when New York passed the famously severe Rockefeller Drug Laws, which made popular the use of mandatory minimum sentences. This paper investigates the political and social context of the Rockefeller Drug Laws and the racial politics therein. It asks how such dramatic shifts in policy came to be, why many New Yorkers came to embrace the punitive, retributive, hard-line penal philosophy, and how alternative visions for addressing the root issues of poverty, crime, and drug use lost both ideological and policy battles.