CCJ 480C Final Project - Final

This podcast episode discusses how the war on drugs has impacted college students. It includes stories of students who have been arrested and charged with drug-related crimes. The episode also explores the negative consequences of mandatory minimum sentencing and the criminalization of drug use. It highlights the prevalence of drug culture on college campuses and the lack of harm reduction measures in the justice system. The episode emphasizes the need for policy changes and harm reduction initiatives to address these issues. Hi everybody, this is Punishment in the High Country, produced by criminology and criminal justice students at Northern Arizona University. Each episode examines issues related to power, mass criminalization, policing, incarceration, and social injustice in Flagstaff and Coconino County. Welcome to our episode discussing how the war on drugs has affected college students. I am your host, August. And I will be your other host, Jackson. Just a warning before we get into things, this episode does contain descriptions of violence and self-harm. Listener discretion is advised. We have two guests for this week's episode. First, we have Mr. Matthew Tanner, who is the Chief Investigator of the Coconino County Public Defender's Office. Mr. Tanner was formerly a police officer in Sedona for seven years before transitioning over to work as a Security Supervisor and Terrorism Liaison Officer, and then eventually to investigative work for the Public Defender's Office in 2018. We are also joined by Deputy Bernie from the Coconino County Sheriff's Office. Deputy Bernie was a college student at NAU for five years, who graduated in May of 2023 and completed academy to formally become a deputy in November of 2023. Today, we are going to be talking about how the war on drugs has impacted and still impacts college students. We are going to give you some background information about the war on drugs, which was popularized in the early 1990s and still exists today. We will then dive into college's drug lifestyle and how this war on drugs affects the lives of these students. To bring you into our little world today, we are going to give you the story of a fellow NAU student. While struggling with mental health, this student attempted suicide using pills she stole. Shortly after, she sought help from Flagstaff Medical Center, but little did she know that three years later, this would lead to her arrest due to drugs being detected in her blood. Ultimately, she got a deferred prosecution, which is similar to probation. However, she was never actually charged with the crime. If she stayed clean and was not re-arrested, then the charges would be dropped. But this took a lot of work from the public defenders to even get the deferred prosecution as an option. So, you are saying that this individual who had a history of mental health challenges and received treatment for these struggles, and who was not an abuser of drugs, was criminally charged three years after her incident? Yes, and while this is a tragic situation, the end result was not as bad as it could have been. Most stories and events within the war on drugs have a worse outcome. For instance, according to a news article in The Atlantic written by Tamara Gilkes-Boer, the probability that a black man would enroll in college declined by 10% due to the war on drugs, from 22% to 20%. After researchers controlled for other factors, such as changes in state-level employment, and then cost of college. This change arose from the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986. Another outcome of this act was the expansion of mandatory minimums, which were introduced in 1984 by the Comprehensive Crime Bill. The sentencing project describes mandatory minimums as legal provisions that require a specific minimum prison terms for certain crimes, regardless of individual circumstances. This legislation was a direct result of the war on drugs, with the emergence of crack and cocaine. For those of you who are not familiar with the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, it introduced a 100 to 1 sentencing disparity between crack and powdered cocaine. Essentially what this means is that if an individual is caught with crack cocaine, he'll be punished the same as being caught with 100 times more powdered cocaine. This is the product of what our first interviewee, Mr. Matthew Tanner, describes the militarization of the judicial system due to the government's war on drugs. Mr. Tanner has experience on both sides of this war, having previously worked in law enforcement and now working in the criminal defense. He had this to say. There's the militarization of the police, and we all see that, and the lack of community policing that's taking place, but that's just half of the coin. The other, that doesn't exist without the militarization of the judicial system and mandatory minimum sentencing. The war on drugs is done by the judicial system. The police officers bring it to them, but the war on drugs is fully fought in the courtroom. That's where it exists. And this is a huge problem. The mandatory minimums are unbiased in a way that has backfired and led to the inability to discriminate between criminals and victims. Here is what Mr. Tanner had to say about mandatory minimums. So mandatory minimums are absolutely evil. They don't take in unique circumstances to anything, and that is basically what our office fights every single day, is minimum sentencing. I can think of five times right now where the judge is sentencing and our client says, I wish I could do more, and then sentences them to prison. We are presented with plea agreements that say, okay, you plead guilty to this and you do five years in prison, but if you go to trial, you're gambling on the mandatory minimum of 10, 15, 20, 30 years. And we do that here 20 times a day, every single day, is we play that game of do we risk trial or not. In 2015, one NAU student was charged with selling cocaine out of Seacrest Hall. When confronted by police, Francisco Curiel stated he was only selling drugs to cover the $600 he needed to purchase textbooks, even though he was on a full academic scholarship. Ultimately, he accepted a plea deal and was sentenced to time served and probation. Stories such as this provide a viewpoint of how far issues pertaining to drug culture have penetrated college life up until the present, as this story occurred almost a decade ago. Our second interviewee, Deputy Bernie, offered firsthand experience, which truly shows how far drug culture has escalated in college environments. 2022, 2023, I think there was a major increase, at least for my freshman year, into my junior, senior year when more students started coming back. I feel like the prevalence of coke was a lot more obvious. And same with like rape drugs being molly, shrooms and stuff like like that. During Mr. Tanner's interview, he mentioned that five to 10 percent of the public defender's docket is made up of full time college students, and most of the crimes they see are for drug and sexual crimes. Of his drug crimes, he mentioned that he sees a lot of students getting arrested for harder drugs, such as psychedelics and prescription drugs. He also mentioned that the majority of the time, these students are found with multiple types of drugs. According to a survey conducted by Substance Abuse and Mental Health Service Administration in 2015, two in three students have been offered prescription drugs by their senior year of college. Out of students that had not used marijuana before college, a study found that 74 percent of them were offered marijuana while at school and 54 percent ended up using marijuana. It is estimated that by the time they graduate college, around 36 percent of students are offered cocaine and 13 percent end up using it. From 2019 to like 22 and 23, I think it has increased a lot. The concept that is more around no matter where you go, that someone has something, someone is selling something somewhere. With both Deputy Bernie and Mr. Tanner acknowledging the scale of college drug culture, it's not hard to see the scale of the issue. So much so that NAU has implemented its own programs and resources to advocate for change. Regarding Greek life at NAU, the Interfraternal Council, or IFC, and the College Panhellenic Council, or CPC, routinely gives out Narcan as well as fentanyl testing shifts to all fraternity and sorority chapters at meetings. This act acknowledges this culture exists and is advocating for harm reduction among the student population. As we have heard, though, the justice system is not so focused on harm reduction, but more focused on the criminalization of drug use. This not only takes away the years they are in prison, but it follows them around making reintegration nearly impossible. According to the article Uprooting the Drug War, in 1998, Congress amended the Higher Education Act of 1965 to exclude students with drug convictions, whether for a felony or misdemeanor, from receiving federal financial aid to attend college. It applied to both federal student loans and Pell grants. In 2015, the Obama administration would amend this to make it possible for some felons to receive aid, but the majority of incarcerated or formerly incarcerated people remain ineligible today. Mr. Tanner touched on this point. Any felony conviction directly affects the rest of your life. You can't integrate back in. You can't get jobs. You can't get housing. You can't get loans. You can't get scholarships. You can't do anything. So you're just you're stuck. The drug war has made it so there is no escape once touched by the system, no matter who or where you are. While enough people have recognized the horror in some ways, the drug war has brought upon us a system that is slow to change. But some programs are leading the way, like the Law Enforcement Action Program, LEAP, which focuses their efforts in lobbying against the prohibition of drugs. While these aren't solutions to the specifics of college students with the war on drugs, it does address the larger issue. Ultimately, the war on drugs has been detrimental to college campuses and the United States Society at large. With this in mind, it is very important to keep harm reduction at the forefront and advocate for policy changes. As such, Coconino County offers free Narcan distribution as well as free fentanyl test strips for those who need it. Please call them at 928-679-7264 for more information and to obtain free harm reduction kits. Thanks for listening to Punishment in the High Country. Please like and subscribe.