Originally published in NY Daily News.
With just hours left in their calendar, legislators are working feverishly to forge consensus on marijuana use in New York. Throughout the drawn-out debate, it seems the legislature is poised to pass decriminalization, making a session already marked by historic criminal justice reform even more remarkable for New York State.
But we cannot gloss over the nearly one million New Yorkers who have been arrested for marijuana possession over the last two decades and continue to pay the price for decades of archaic marijuana policy. To that end, any legislative deal decriminalizing the use of marijuana must include provisions for sealing and expunging the records of individuals incarcerated for marijuana-related offenses.
The War on Drugs may have become a national campaign, but as with so many national efforts, its roots can be traced back to New York. In this case, the Rockefeller Drugs Laws from 1973, which set off an explosion of incarceration that we’re confronting today.
For over the past 20 years, New York has been the national epicenter for marijuana arrests, with nearly 800,000 arrests for possession of small amounts of marijuana, according to the Drug Policy Alliance. And though some think this is mostly a New York City issue, on average, more than 60 people are arrested every day for marijuana possession across the entire state.
However, the burden of these arrests do not fall on everyone’s shoulders equally. While marijuana consumption and sales occur at similar rates across racial and ethnic groups, black and Latino individuals are arrested at disproportionately higher rates.
Nationally, black people were nearly four times more likely to be arrested for possession than white people in 2010. The discrepancy is even more extreme in New York, where in 2016 more than 80% of all those arrested statewide were black and Latino.
And while popular cultural likes to portray marijuana as a gateway drug, it’s actually the arrest for marijuana possession that’s the gateway to an unrelenting and unremitting criminal justice complex.
Once arrested, men and women are ensnared in a Kafkaesque system that critically compromises their ability to succeed and participate in society. An arrest record can prevent them from obtaining employment, housing, student loans, and litany of other collateral consequences.
Moreover, when a single person gets arrested, the effects spread outward, like ripples on a pond, impacting families and communities. A marijuana arrest can mean the loss of a brother or sister, a mother or father, or stable income; it weakens the sinews of civil society and saps our state’s economic potential.
For this reason, expungement is one of those unique policies that can be both the right thing to do, and also the advantageous thing to do.
A recent study by the University of Michigan Law School found that as a result of that state’s expungement law — which unlike what is being considered in New York does not allow for automatic expungement — people whose records were expunged saw their wages go up by more than 20% in just the first year on average. The study also found that crime rates among recipients of expungement were considerably lower than those of Michigan’s general adult population.
Like the harmful effects of arrest and incarceration, the benefits of expungement have the potential to cascade downward by reinvigorating local economies and allowing more New Yorkers to fully participate in society.
Combined with the significant pretrial reforms achieved earlier in this session, the Legislature and governor have demonstrated a real commitment to making the Empire State fairer and safer for all. They have begun the work necessary to right the wrongs codified into the criminal justice system for decades.
To pass legislation around marijuana without expungement would be an act of bad faith towards hardworking New Yorkers trying to move forward. In these final days of debate, our leaders must remember the hundreds of thousands who continue to suffer under the weight of the past.