The Communal Impacts of Drug Criminalization in Maryland

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“Brown et al. (2016) report that they believed that there was not a consensus regarding evidencebased methodologies for community development from justice-reinvested funds. By comparison, the criminogenic risk and needs literature provided guidance on EBPs. Furthermore, the EBP focus was consistent with JRI technical assistance providers’ expertise in working with state agencies. The TA providers argued that a justice system focus for JRI better aligned with their skills and experience than a focus on communities. As Brown and colleagues report, one TA provider acknowledged ‘we’re not community redevelopment experts.’ Although JRI TA providers did not dispute the fact that disadvantaged communities had great needs, they also pointed to legitimate weaknesses in state corrections systems’ operations and argued that these problems needed to be addressed. These problems provided opportunities for change without needing to take a place-based approach to justice reinvestment (79).” It is important to note that these failures to invest in community came not from active resistance to the concept of reinvestment, but from methodological concerns about “evidence-based practices” being centered and reporting expectations to state and federal government agencies. This technocratic inertia often overwhelms good intentions in the midst of policy implementation, a reality that threatens the ability for drug decriminalization to deliver on lofty rhetoric around community impact. Policy advocates should make it clear that, rather than a revenue-saving or revenue-neutral bill, decrim should be seen as an investment in community capacity to do the work and to work with stakeholders in affected communities to identify what forms of investment meet their needs. This also means decrim advocates would have to do away with one of the arguments most prominently associated with the drug decriminalization position, that money from ending drug criminalization can be reinvested into the community. Police funding, despite a nationwide “defund the police” movement, has largely gone up in major metropolitan areas. Moreover, much of decriminalization advocacy comes at a state level, while most police departments are funded largely at the municipal level (80). Claiming that decrim working largely at a state level can deliver what a nationwide protest movement can not and shifting money from police to social services at a city/county level, will likely lead to the sort of disappointment and backlash expressed by interviewees in this report. Advocates will likely not be able to deliver on promised investments, further eroding community trust, and potentially harming support for future reform efforts. Decrim advocates should be honest with themselves and learn the complex realities of how public money flows. Assume your audience is smart enough to hear the hard truth about how difficult it is to win longterm sustainable funding for community-controlled political and social service infrastructure and strategize with those within civil society who are committed to doing the long, hard, systemic work of shifting resources. 2. End Deference to Exogenous “Best Practice” Models Our work demands a rethink of the well-intentioned but ultimately short-sighted rush to import “best practice” models for drug decriminalization from other states (like Oregon) or even overseas (like the socalled Portugal model drug decriminalization) into places like Maryland. The Oregon model, for all of its potential benefits, still vest decision-making power largely within the professional public health institutions, which in Baltimore have a particularly fraught history when it comes to race relations. Additionally, the Portugal model, though lauded as “proof” that decriminalization can work, may not be as clean of a fit as decrim advocates tend to claim. America, unlike Portugal, is home to a child “welfare” system which has a massively disproportionate racial bias toward investigating and separating Black families, with over 50% of Black children subject to a family welfare investigation at some point in their lives (81). Is there much doubt that, in places like Baltimore, a Black citizen's involvement in a theoretically “non-criminal” Portugal-style drug counseling system would be more likely to trigger increased scrutiny from the family regulation system, with potential consequences of permanent family separation? The researcher was surprised to learn that Portugal’s lauded decrim model does have potential punitive elements (82). While these are often not used in Portugal, is it not likely that the same model would produce different results in a nation defined by anti-Blackness? Why should grassroots 43 of 55
advocates trust the experience of other nations that decriminalization didn’t increase drug sales, drug use, or violent crime, given these nations have fundamentally different histories, demographics, patterns of violent crime, and gun laws? Is it surprising that Black community members don’t quite show trust in the rigor of decrim advocate’s analysis of White Supremacy? This is not to say this model is inherently bad, but its presentation uncritically as a best practice model for American policy must be rethought, and the communities have legitimate concerns about these models which must be met with legitimate answers. Whatever system is presented for decrim, putting community control and structure accountability to the community at its center will be key to preventing decrim from potentially becoming another vector of anti-Black violence. Places have fundamentally different political histories, needs, and importantly, indigenous cultural and community resources. Seeing how criminalization prevents these resources from being cultivated, and how decriminalization can build community-controlled infrastructure that cultivates these resources, should be central to future research and policy work on decrim. 3. Be Prepared to Negotiate “Thermostatic” Criminal Justice Policymaking and Reject the Violent/Nonviolent Offender Dichotomy Fordham University professor John Pfaff in his book, Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarcerationand How to Achieve Real Reform notes that drug policies have regularly relied on a “standard story” of mass incarceration, driven by mandatory minimums for nonviolent low-level drug offenses, to push “pragmatic” drug policy reforms (83). He notes that this standard model no longer corresponds with reality, writing: “In reality, only about 16 percent of state prisoners are serving time on drug charges—and very few of them, perhaps only around 5 or 6 percent of that group, are both low level and nonviolent. At the same time, more than half of all people in state prisons have been convicted of a violent crime. A strategy based on decriminalizing drugs will thus disappoint—and disappoint significantly....” In Maryland specifically, Pfaff notes that: “Maryland, generally more liberal than South Carolina, passed a reform bill in 2016 that also cut sanctions for nonviolent crimes while increasing punishments for some violent ones in order to avoid looking ‘soft on crime.’” (ibid). The concern is echoed in some grassroot policy advocates, who are concerned not only that the focus on non-violent drug offenders trades off with the deeper issues of the larger anxieties lawmakers in the state have around Black criminality, specifically in Baltimore City, a place over coded with conceptions of criminality in the eyes of many lawmakers, that continues to drive more criminalization policies. Moreover, there is concern at “thermostatic” effect, where decreasing criminalization on lower-level drug crimes gets paired with increase criminalization on other fronts. It is possible that drug policy advocates will be asked by some to support these sorts of increased criminalization on violent crime laws as a quidpro-quo for support on drug decriminalization. My group, Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, has consistently pushed back against Democrat and Republican supported mandatory minimum/sentencing enhancement legislation in Annapolis. In this work, we have had to develop our own alternative version of the “Standard analysis” of mass incarceration, one more compatible with criminal justice reform that includes sentencing reform for the violent offender who actually make up the majority of those incarcerated in state prisons today. I am presenting an abbreviated form of this analysis in an appendix to help drug policy advocates respond if they are faced with a request to support increased criminalization of “violent crime” in exchange for support for drug decriminalization. Using this analysis to push back against sentencing enhancement and mandatory minimums has allowed us to push non-reformist reforms that we believe help build the social political infrastructure needed for police and prison abolition, while taking community concerns for public safety serious and concretely 44 of 55
Page 1 and 2: THE COMMUNAL IMPACTS OF DRUG CRIMIN
Page 3 and 4: Acknowledgements We would like to t
Page 5 and 6: “groupthink”. Also, I realize t
Page 7 and 8: Decriminalize Blackness First “It
Page 9 and 10: Indeed, this quote comes from a for
Page 11 and 12: criminal elements involved in the i
Page 13 and 14: Reparations Means Community Repair,
Page 15 and 16: The Communal Impacts of Drug Crimin
Page 17 and 18: The community-based scholar is info
Page 19 and 20: Definitions Black Civil Society Thi
Page 21 and 22: works. Specifically, we looked at h
Page 23 and 24: working with other Black Power orga
Page 25 and 26: Pseudonym Occupation/Community Role
Page 27 and 28: limiting a pipeline. There’s not
Page 29 and 30: “Black and brown people are being
Page 31 and 32: health and for community education?
Page 33 and 34: friendship community, 'cause heroin
Page 35 and 36: “And then actually right out of F
Page 37 and 38: 3. Decriminalization does not recog
Page 39 and 40: “It’s the values that people ha
Page 41 and 42: A local pastor family interviewed r
Page 43: Policymakers and researchers intere
Page 47 and 48: powerful independent Black institut
Page 49 and 50: trust working-class people in turn
Page 51 and 52: systemic corruption and incompetenc
Page 53 and 54: & The Baltimore “Black Hole” [I
Page 55 and 56: Dan Baum investigates whether gun-c
Page 57: © 2023

The Communal Impacts of Drug Criminalization in Maryland

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