The harsh penalties for possession of marijuana in Illinois have recently come under fire for a number of reasons. Many believe that charging individuals for misdemeanor marijuana possession, which is the leading arrest category in Chicago, is a waste of police time and tax dollars. Across the country, attitudes towards marijuana are shifting in favor of decriminalization or, in the cases of Colorado and Washington, legalization. Amidst these changing attitudes and the controversy over disproportionate drug crime sentencing, Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel is voicing his support for the decriminalization of marijuana in Illinois.

Mayor Emanuel, who rose to political prominence as the White House chief of staff under President Obama, testified before the Illinois General Assembly about potentially removing the state’s strict pot ban. He told the Chicago Tribune that he believes it’s time “to free up our criminal justice system to address or real public safety challenges” and that decriminalizing marijuana would not only “save time and money” but would also “change people’s lives.” Emanuel’s statement seems to allude to the significant percentage of criminal offenders who are currently serving lengthy sentences in overcrowded prisons for non-violent drug crimes. According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, almost half of all US prisoners are serving a sentence for drug offenses.

Emanuel also spoke about the impact a criminal conviction for possession of marijuana can have on the rest of a person’s life. Even though the crime is a misdemeanor, having a criminal record at all can significantly impact a person’s ability to go to college, get a good job, or even find a place to live. There is significant evidence that there is a huge racial disparity in arrests and convictions for drug crimes, and many of the people who find themselves facing these convictions already face major institutional barriers in creating a better life.

Where Illinois and the Rest of the Country Currently Stands on Marijuana

Emanuel’s high-profile push for the decriminalization of marijuana may signal a change in the wind for the state. Illinois has already made some small changes and last year became the twentieth state to legalize medicinal marijuana. However, even regulations on medicinal marijuana remain tight, and Governor Pat Quinn said that he was willing to sign the bill legalizing medical marijuana because it was “so tightly and properly drafted.” 23 states (including Illinois) and the District of Columbia have now made medical marijuana legal.

If Illinois does decriminalize marijuana, it will join DC and 17 states that have already done so. As mentioned above, Colorado and Washington are the only states that have actually legalized recreational marijuana, but Oregon, California, Alaska, Hawaii, Maine, and DC are beginning to look as though they will all pass legalization initiatives in the next several years.

Illinois residents should keep in mind that while attitudes are shifting in our state and nationwide, and while there will hopefully come a time when our states does decriminalize cannabis, Illinois still has some of the toughest marijuana possession restrictions and penalties in the country. If you’re charged with a misdemeanor for the possession of a small amount of marijuana, make sure that you contact a drug crimes attorney as soon as possible and fight to have the charge dropped. You don’t want a conviction negatively affecting the rest of your life.

About the Author: Andrew M. Weisberg is a former felony prosecutor who now serves as a defense attorney in the greater Chicago area. He has extensive experience in handling all types of criminal cases, from sex offenses and violent crimes to theft-related crimes and domestic violence.

It’s no secret that the United States’ prisons are overpopulated with offenders serving time for nonviolent drug crimes. Now, however, the US Sentencing Commission is seeking to address that problem through an early release proposal. The proposal, which the Sentencing Commission passed earlier this month, will make over 46,000 current inmates eligible for early release starting in November 2015. As this policy is gradually phased in, it should cut the average prison sentence by about 25 months.

Reasons for Early Release Program

The new early release program is, in large part, a long overdue reaction to overcrowding in prisons. The US prison population dramatically increased from about 500,000 inmates in 1980 to an estimated 2.3 million in 2008. Today, roughly 1 in 100 American adults is behind bars.

Why the dramatic increase in prisoners in the last 34 years? It’s not necessarily that more crimes are being committed, but that legislators have taken a tough line on drug crimes, and lower-level offenses are being penalized more harshly.

This attitude began in the 1970s, when President Nixon called drugs “public enemy number one” in the US, and grew into a fervent war on drugs during the Reagan administration. The 3,000 federal laws in the 1980s grew to 4,450 federal laws—many of which were related to drug crimes—by 2008. As a result, many people are locked up not because they actually pose a threat to society, but because they’ve committed a low-level drug offense or another technical violation that they may not even have known existed. In fact, over half of all inmates in federal prisons are there for drug crimes.

Retroactively reducing the sentences of current drug offenders should also begin to address race-related disparities in sentencing. According to research reported by the NAACP, five times more white people than African-Americans use drugs, yet African-Americans are sent to prison for drug offenses ten times more than Caucasians. On average, African-Americans spend about the same amount of time in prison for a drug offense (58.7 months) as white people do for committing a violent offense.

As Attitudes Change, We Need to Do Away with Disproportionate Sentences

The public attitude towards sentencing for drug crimes is finally starting to shift, and the early release program reflects this. But while the program is certainly a good thing, it’s tragic that many of the prisoners who will be eligible for early release have already spent over a decade of their lives in prison for a drug-dealing or drug possession offense.

Going forward, our justice system needs to rethink sentencing for drug crimes. For many of these nonviolent offenders, prison is not a necessary measure to “keep them from harming society.” Furthermore, prison is rarely a truly successful form of rehabilitation, and an alternative sentence—perhaps involving parole and counseling, in some cases—may be better suited to preventing recidivism.

If you or someone you love is currently being charged with a drug crime in the greater Chicago area, contact a Chicago drug lawyer as soon as possible. While drug crime policies are slowly changing, you can still expect Chicago’s prosecutors and judges to take a harsh line, and you need an experienced attorney to start building a strong defense as soon as possible.

About the Author: Andrew M. Weisberg is a former felony prosecutor who now serves as a defense attorney in the greater Chicago area for the Law Offices of Andrew Weisberg. He has extensive experience in handling all types of criminal cases, from sex offenses and violent crimes to theft-related crimes and traffic violations.

There are a lot of problems with our prison system, but the one I’m referring to in the title of my post is twofold. One, non-violent offenders often receive sentences that are disproportionate to their crime; and two, our prisons have become overcrowded and sometimes even inhumane because of all the non-violent offenders whiling away lengthy sentences behind bars.

Let’s take a look at some of the statistics first. As of 2009, there were 2.23 million Americans serving time for felonies in state and federal prisons or local jails. We have the largest prison population in the world, and our rate of incarceration is five to ten times higher than that of Western Europe and other democratic countries. Although our country only has 5% of the world’s population, we have almost a quarter of all the world’s prisoners. If there’s a better argument out there for making sure that you get a good criminal lawyer in Chicago, I haven’t heard it.

Simply put, our existing prison structures are not equipped to hold this many inmates, and, as a result prisons are becoming overcrowded. Prison overcrowding brings with it a myriad of problems, including increased stress for inmates and prison officials, psychological damage to inmates, prison mismanagement, and an increase in prison violence.

Some might make the case that our crowded prisons are a “necessary evil” and that our prison system is in place to keep us safe from dangerous criminals. This black-and-white logic breaks down, however, when you realize that nearly half of all federal inmates are being imprisoned for drug crimes, not violent offenses.

How We Got Here: The War on Drugs

Our prisons haven’t always had this overcrowding problem. In the 1970s, our federal and state prisons held about 200,000 inmates—about a tenth of our prison population now. A major change came in the 1980s, when our government promoted a “war on drugs” to address what was then viewed as a crack cocaine epidemic. During this time, Congress enacted “mandatory minimum” sentences, which required certain sentence lengths for certain federal and state crimes. This led to unduly harsh punishments for a lot of drug offenders, including many first time offenders with no history of violence.

Harsh sentencing for drug crimes continued into the 1990s, when Congress enacted “three strike” laws, which gave repeat offenders longer mandatory sentences, and “truth-in-sentencing” laws, which require federal prisoners to serve a minimum of 85% of their original sentence and makes early parole nearly impossible.

Today, we’re seeing the effects of these laws: expanding prison populations and the incarceration of people who shouldn’t be spending their life behind bars. Our system has incarcerated people like Barbara Scrivner, a mother who has served 20 years of her 30 year sentence for possessing a few ounces of meth, and Sharanda Jones, another mom serving a life sentence for a first-time non-violent cocaine offense. These are people who pose no real threat to society and who just want to be released so that they can spend their remaining years with their families, but the drug crime laws of the ‘80s and ‘90s have made their early releases extremely unlikely.

New Clemency Guidelines Reflect Shift in Attitude towards Drug Crimes

There is some hope for people like Scrivner and Jones. Our overcrowded prisons have led many politicians to reflect on the efficacy of long sentences for drug offenders, and this past April, US attorney general Eric Holder announced that the Obama administration had created new guidelines for clemency petitions, allowing non-violent offenders who have served at least 10 years to apply for early release.

Currently, these new clemency guidelines are only applicable to federal prisoners who have had a clean record while serving time, but several states may soon begin considering similar measures in order to reduce prison crowding. California in particular could benefit from these guidelines – their overcrowded state prisons have made headlines in the past few years, and courts have ordered Governor Jerry Brown to reduce overcrowding.

As a drug lawyer in Chicago, I believe that my own state of Illinois could also benefit from adopting similar guidelines. In 2012, the AP reported that there were 49,154 inmates in Illinois state prisons, well over the 33,700 inmates our prisons were designed to hold.

The Bureau of Prisons just announced the new guidelines to federal prisoners in late April, and electronic surveys are going out to those inmates whom the Bureau thinks deserve clemency. It’s too early to see exactly what kind of an impact this is going to have on our country’s prison population, but it is certainly a step in the right direction. By combining the clemency guidelines with lesser sentences for first-time drug offenders, we can reduce our prison population and keep it from rapidly ballooning again.

About the Author Andrew M. Weisberg is a criminal defense attorney in Chicago, Illinois. A former prosecutor in Cook County, Mr. Weisberg,is a member of the Capital Litigation Trial Bar, an elite group of criminal attorneys who are certified by the Illinois Supreme Court to try death penalty cases. He is also a member of the Federal Trial Bar. Mr. Weisberg is a sole practitioner at the Law Offices of Andrew M. Weisberg.

There may be little or no difference between the amount of pot white and black people smoke, but there’s surely a huge gap between black/white drug arrests. According to a detailed report by the American Civil Liberties Union, black Americans are four times more likely to get arrested for drug use and possession. The data, collected from all 50 states and the District of Colombia, provides an accurate depiction of drug law enforcement by race and state.

It turns out 14 percent of black people and 12 percent of white people have reported in 2010 they have used marijuana at least once in the previous year. The report shows a greater number of arrests for whites – 460,808 – than blacks, with only 282,117 arrests, but the numbers translate in 716/100,000 for blacks versus only 192/100,000 for whites. In Minnesota, Illinois and Washington D.C., black Americans were up to 8.5 times more likely than whites to be put behind bars for marijuana possession.

Some theories claim that the reason why blacks are more likely to get arrested is because it’s easier for the police to intervene and bust people in the “open air” drug markets currently found in black communities, as opposed to searching through the basements and country clubs of white communities. Furthermore, the increased likelihood of black defendants to insult police officers and be rebellious increases the chances ofarrest.

Decriminalization to Save Money

The financial burden of drug arrests on the U.S. economy is tremendous. Economists believe the government could save more than $13 billion on prohibition enforcement costs by decriminalizing marijuana use and almost $1 billion/year in incarceration costs for marijuana-related charges. On the other hand, legal marijuana could be an industry with a value of $45 to $100 billion, according to a recent Bloomberg report, while each hydroponic marijuana growing store could provide at least 75 jobs indirectly.

The sad part is; the huge costs are in most part supported by taxpayers. According to Forbes.com, marijuana prohibition costs tax-payers a staggering $41.8 billion per year, as the value of the market for illegal marijuana exceeded $36 billion in the U.S. only.

Decriminalization to End Racism

The solution to the disparities between white and black arrests is somewhat evident: decriminalization of marijuana will eventually reduce the overall arrest rates. In 2009, the state of Massachusetts decriminalized the possession of small amounts of marijuana,and since then has seen a significant reduction in the number of arrests, from 9,000 to almost 1,200. It even caused the black/white arrest gap to narrow, from 5.4 to 3.41, and there’s no reason to think that legalization would not be effective in erasing such disparities.

Clearly, legalization would not only put an end to the wasteful spending of law enforcement resources, but according to almost half of Americans surveyed in recent polls, it would also boost the economy, since the millions that are now going to drug cartels could be redirected to state budgets by taxing and regulating marijuana similar to alcohol.

The end of marijuana prohibition would also restore the image of black drug users, considered criminals or debased human beings,and abolish the discriminatory policies that reinforce social and ethnic discrepancies. With the help of a criminal defense lawyer, individualscan reduce the impact criminal charges have on their professional and social lives, granting them the same access as before towell-paid jobs, housing or child custody.

About the Author: Andrew M. Weisberg is a criminal defense attorney in Chicago, Illinois. A former prosecutor in Cook County, Mr. Weisberg,is a member of the Capital Litigation Trial Bar, an elite group of criminal attorneys who are certified by the Illinois Supreme Court to try death penalty cases. He is also a member of the Federal Trial Bar. Mr. Weisberg is a sole practitioner at the Law Offices of Andrew M. Weisberg.

Although Colorado and Washington have decriminalized the use of marijuana and more than 20 states have allowed prescribing and limited possession of medical marijuana, the recreational drug still remains a sure ticket to prison in the rest of the country.

According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting statistics for 2012, there were 1,552,432 drug arrests nationwide, slightly higher than in 2011, among which nearly half were for marijuana possession and use. That’s one marijuana arrest every 48 seconds in 2012, for possession only, and one arrest every 42 seconds for distribution, the same as in 2011.

Advocacy groups supporting the legalization and decriminalization of marijuana believe prosecuting people for use and possession of marijuana is a waste of the already-limited law enforcement resources, when they could deploy all forces towards violent crimes.

The latest Gallup poll results reveal that more than half of the Americans surveyed on the matter favored the end of marijuana prohibition. 58 percent were in favor of legalization,and only 39 percent opposed. The data shows a significant increase of 10% since last year, when Washington and Colorado declared marijuana use legal.

Socio-Economic Consequences for Arrestees

People arrested are, most of the times, handcuffed and taken to the police station, where they have their picture and fingerprints taken and sent to the FBI, never to be sealed or expunged from their records. Typically, some will spend at least 24 hours before appearing before a judge, while others are given a citation for a court appearance and then released.

In most cases, people choose to plead guilty for marijuana possession, a crime that can either be treated as a Class A misdemeanor or Class C felony, depending primarily on the defendant’s criminal record and whether or not the drug was intended for personal use only. Penalties for misdemeanor possession of marijuana are maximum one year in jail and a fine of $2,000. Other costs incurred in a drug misdemeanor case, including bail, attorney’s fees and court expenses, can add up to $5,000.

A marijuana conviction, however, will impact the life of the defendant in numerous ways, ranging from child custody issues, federally-insured student loans, the right to vote, the right to possess firearms, the right to reside in subsidized housing to the ability to adopt children or obtain welfare benefits. A misdemeanor will remain on the record for at least 3 years and a felony for at least five before it can be expunged by a court of law, period during which it can affect the chances of accessing housing and future employment.

Legal Help

An experienced criminal defense lawyer can help an individual caught using or possessing marijuana avoid prison terms and the serious consequences a local orfederal arrest can bring about. Whether guilty or not guilty, the criminal defendant faces a long and grueling procedure, often resulting in conviction and harsh sentence upon failing to demonstrate the evidence is flawed and the allegations false.

A legal counselor will clearly explain all available options to you, making sure the chosen course of action is in your best interest. If the current charge is a first offense, the likelihood of being released with low bail until the trial are high, allowing you and your attorney to prepare a defense and avoid prison terms.

About the Author Andrew M. Weisberg is a criminal defense attorney in Chicago, Illinois. A former prosecutor in Cook County, Mr. Weisberg,is a member of the Capital Litigation Trial Bar, an elite group of criminal attorneys who are certified by the Illinois Supreme Court to try death penalty cases. He is also a member of the Federal Trial Bar. Mr. Weisberg is a sole practitioner at the Law Offices of Andrew M. Weisberg.