ALLENTOWN, Pa. — When Leola Bivins was first sent away for dealing drugs, she was a 22-year-old high school dropout with a 2-year-old daughter at home.
Addiction was the center of the life she knew in East Stroudsburg, where she was born and raised, she recalled recently. Bivins’ mother was a heroin addict — she eventually died of an overdose — and seemingly everyone around her was either selling drugs or abusing them, Bivins said.
That was nearly 20 years ago and a drug scare was sweeping Pennsylvania and the nation, prompting pledges by lawmakers to beat back the scourge. But if today’s heroin epidemic has brought calls for better treatment and more compassion, the mid-1980s to late-1990s’ crack cocaine epidemic prompted a very different response: Lock them up and throw away the key.
Bivins experienced that firsthand, spending nine and a half years in state and federal prisons for selling cocaine and crack. Now 41, she has turned her life around. She holds a bachelor’s degree and hopes to get her master’s, and she works as a counselor for at-risk girls at the Northampton County Juvenile Justice Center in Easton.
“I don’t think I was treated fairly in the beginning,” Bivins said. “I was young. I didn’t have an education. I needed treatment.”
To backers, the war on drugs of the ’80s and ’90s was needed medicine at a time when society’s ills — violent crime, the rise of gangs — required quarantine. But to a growing number of critics, the effort was at best misguided and at worst devastating to the communities it affected, which were disproportionately urban, black or Hispanic.
Today, even some of its most vocal supporters have abandoned the get-tough measures as ineffective and draconian. But taxpayers continue to grapple with the effects, under which Pennsylvania built and renovated 20 state prisons since the mid-1980s, as its inmate population more than tripled to 49,561 and its corrections budget more than doubled to $2.2 billion, state Corrections Department records show.
The same is true at the Federal Bureau of Prisons, where the number of inmates has grown more than fourfold since 1986, to 191,024 — nearly half of whom are in for drug offenses. This year, taxpayers will spend $7.5 billion for it, more than 12 times higher than the cost three decades ago.
