02/07/1993    BOSTON (AP) -- More people are being locked up for
drug offenses -- particularly minority youth -- at a time when drug
use is decreasing and other violent crimes are on the rise, the
American Bar Association said Sunday.
   "We have a criminal justice system in this country that is on a
fast track to collapse" because of the heavy emphasis on drug
enforcement, said Neal Sonnett, chairman of the ABA's criminal
justice section.
   "The criminal justice system is devoting more of its resources
and attention to drug offenses and less to violent crime," Sonnett
said. "Unless we do something now ... we are going to have a
criminal justice system that is crushed under the caseload of
criminal cases without any appreciable decrease in crime."
   Andrew L. Sonner, a prosecutor in Montgomery County Md., said he
fears communities will continue cutting back on schools and
libraries to pay for more jails and prisons to hold the increasing
number of inmates.
   But schools and libraries "have more to do with the prevention of
crime than locking people up for (long) terms," Sonner said.
   The ABA group analyzed a variety of government statistics for
federal and state law enforcement, courts and prisons.
   According to the report, arrests for drug offenses rose by 24
percent from 1985 to 1991 although household surveys during the same
period showed that the share of the population using drugs dropped
from 12 percent to 6 percent.
   The number of adults in prison for drug offenses rose by 327
percent from 1986 to 1991, while the number imprisoned for all
crimes rose by 50 percent and the number for violent crimes rose by
41 percent.
   The 346,000 adults incarcerated for violent crimes in 1991 still
was more than double the 165,000 imprisoned for drug crimes, but
drug offenders make up a growing share of the nationwide prison
population.
   Spending on law enforcement has become more heavily weighted
toward prisons than police, the report said. Too often, Sonner said,
violent criminals must be released from prison early to make room
for drug offenders serving long mandatory sentences.
   The ABA has long opposed the mandatory sentences required by
federal law mainly for drug offenses. Previously, federal judges had
wider discretion to set sentences for such crimes.
  Sonnett said it would be wrong to attribute the decline in drug
use to the increasing arrests and imprisonments. Instead, he said,
public education has made drug use less socially acceptable.
   Alfred Blumstein, dean of public policy and management at
Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, said in an interview
earlier in the weekend that statistics have shown that cocaine use
peaked in 1982 and began dropping.
   "The crackdown on drugs is really a post-1985 phenomenon," he
said. "It's tough to attribute the decline very much to the war on
drugs."