Prohibition costs Illinois big bucks

PUBLIC POLICY | Bruce Rushton

As marijuana traffickers go, Jason Alan Spyres was far from the best.

He was just 19 when police in Woodford County found a bag of pot in Spyres’ car and arrested him for possession. Less than a year later, he was arrested again and charged with cannabis trafficking in Macon County – his mother had shipped 38 pounds of pot to him from California via United Parcel Service, with police intercepting the package. While out on bond, he was caught again, this time during a raid that also netted a meth dealer, and received a second trafficking charge.

“I was not thinking very clearly – I was in the height of my addiction,” explains Linda Spyres, a recovering addict who was using methamphetamine when she shipped the box to her son.

After six months in a California jail, Linda Spyres was sentenced to three years of probation. Her felony drug conviction has been set aside, and she now works as a counselor in the same treatment program that helped her kick drugs. She expects to receive a master’s degree in social work this spring.

“My life is definitely turned around,” she says.

The meth dealer arrested along with Jason Spyres pleaded guilty and received a 12-year sentence. He was released from prison years ago.

Jason Spyres, who had no prior record, is not so fortunate.

Three cannabis charges within 18 months netted Spyres a 30-year sentence, 20 years of it for the same marijuana that got probation for his mother, his supplier. After nearly 10 years in prison, he has a projected parole date of June 11, 2018. By the time Spyres, 30, gets out, he will have spent nearly half of his life behind bars. He is incarcerated at Taylorville Correctional Center, a minimum-security prison where it costs $20,034 a year to keep an inmate locked up.

“I was a very arrogant and stupid young kid who didn’t realize how much of his life he was jeopardizing,” Spyres says. “I made a conscious act that was in violation of our laws. That deserves punishment. … You don’t get to prison by making good choices. I’m here for selling marijuana.”

Assuming Spyres is paroled on schedule, taxpayers who have already spent six figures arresting, prosecuting and incarcerating him will spend another $120,000 keeping society safe. And make no mistake: In the eyes of the Illinois criminal justice system, Spyres is a menace to society. Cannabis trafficking is a Class X offense, the most serious category of felony on the books. Someone convicted of second-degree murder is considered a less dangerous criminal and can pay their debt to society via probation, without ever seeing the inside of a state prison.

Although he has earned an associates degree via correspondence school, there is no real incentive for Spyres to do anything but watch television, sleep and read. Unlike other categories of criminals, Class X felons don’t get time off their sentences if they enroll in drug treatment, educational or work programs.

Spyres is not alone. As of Dec. 31, 777 people were locked up in Illinois prisons for cannabis offenses, according to the state Department of Corrections. It is not a lucky number for taxpayers. At an average annual cost of $21,911 per inmate, according to the prison department’s most recent figures, the public is paying more than $17 million per year to keep pot peddlers and users behind bars.

In Sangamon County, 21 people were locked up in the county jail for cannabis offenses as of three weeks ago. That’s more than $1,000 a day in incarceration costs based on the $53 per diem the county charges for housing federal prisoners.

It’s money well spent, according to Jack Campbell, chief deputy of the Sangamon County sheriff’s office. Legalizing pot, he says, isn’t a good idea.

“They’re still going to commit crimes to go out and get their drugs,” Campbell says.

Legalization advocates scoff. “People don’t rob liquor stores at gunpoint to get money to buy pot,” says Jon Gettman, former head of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) who now teaches criminal justice courses at Shenandoah University in Virginia. “It’s not smoking pot that leads to kids snorting cocaine. It’s the people they buy pot from that leads to cocaine.”

“It’s just such a political issue”

The prosecutor who sent Spyres to prison says that he is exactly where he belongs. Although he wasn’t convicted of selling meth, Spyres was nonetheless trafficking in methamphetamine, says Jay Scott, first assistant state’s attorney for Macon County (Spyres says he passed a police polygraph regarding meth involvement). Beyond that, Scott noted that Spyres caught additional cannabis charges after his first arrest.

“In my opinion, that’s a person who’s just kind of thumbing his nose at the system,” says Scott, who testified against Spyres during a clemency hearing last year before the state Prisoner Review Board.

Scott, who is running for state’s attorney in Macon County, says that marijuana should remain illegal.

“So many times, it’s a gateway drug to harder drugs,” Scott says. “The arguments to the contrary, I don’t accept them after being involved in prosecution for 25 years. It gets kids into that culture and drug use. I think the laws are fine the way they are.”

But George Atterberry, a retired Illinois prison guard who spent nearly a quarter-century watching over inmates including Spyres, says that it’s time to overhaul marijuana laws.

“As far as I can tell, it should be legal,” says Atterberry, who once guarded Spyres and testified in favor of clemency for him. “I’ve had people in my family arrested. I’ve seen what it’s done in the prison system. I’ve just seen the lack of logic on the issue. ... The bottom line is, tobacco and alcohol kill almost a half-million people a year each year, and we don’t bat an eye – it’s sold in the grocery stores. It’s just such a political issue.”

Outright legalization has a shot this year in Colorado, where an initiative is on the ballot, and the state of Washington, where the issue is before the legislature and will go to voters if lawmakers fail to act.

Legalization has been a mixed bag in a nation where 16 states and the District of Columbia allow medical use of marijuana. Voters in California, where marijuana for medical purposes was approved in 1996, rejected a legalization proposal in 2010. Colorado voters did likewise in 2006. In Illinois, a medical marijuana measure passed the Senate in 2009 and last year came within seven votes of passing in the House.

Dangers exaggerated

The push to ease marijuana restrictions comes as anti-pot arguments have crumbled.

Some researchers have found that performance on driving simulators actually improves after cannabis use, and there is no evidence that a plethora of medical marijuana dispensaries in California and elsewhere that began cropping up more than a decade ago has resulted in any increase in accidents or DUI arrests.

Although the National Highway Transportation and Safety Administration says that it isn’t safe to smoke pot and drive, a 1993 study funded by NHTSA determined that marijuana’s effects on driving were “relatively small.” A 1992 NHTSA study in which researchers analyzed the blood of more than 1,800 drivers killed in accidents found that drivers under the influence of marijuana were no more likely to die in crashes than sober drivers.

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