Tales from the West Texas Dust

We continue with Part II of our interview with Sam Parker:

Suite 101: We hear a lot in our mass media in terms of gangs; we hear a lot about our youth going astray and how they are eventually ending up in the criminal justice system and how drugs and alcohol is usually a very big factor in that. I want you to focus in that--what about our youth? How does drugs and alcohol abuse impact the incarceration of juvenile delinquents?

Parker: It's very interesting to look at that. The distribution of illegal drugs,for example, has always been the perview of adults up until the modern era--I'm talking about the last six years. You see, the purveyors of very addictive substances like heroin twenty years ago would never dream of letting a teenager or a child hold these drugs. And then the marketers of such drugs developed a very interesting perspective. If a young person who was not prosecutable under the law possessed the drug and then they were busted by the law, then they were very often not prosecuted as adults, but prosecuted as juveniles--and the prosecution was very light considering what an adult would get if they were possessing for sale or possessing for distribution a harmful substance or a virulently addictive drug like heroin or cocaine.

And so individuals who would be in charge of drugs distribution might contact several young people in order to distribute the goods or to take the product, as they call it, from one part of town to another. And then the kingpins of the drug industry got the idea that they didn't really need these older middle distributors anyway--and then the Rockefeller law, for example, came into effect in the early '70s [and] let individuals who were youthful be prosecuted with adult penalties. For example, in the state of Texas, that kind of law followed close on the heels of the Rockefeller law in New York so that 15- and 16-year-olds could be prosecuted as adults insofar as the distribution and sale [of drugs]...So an individual who would be handling crack cocaine would be an individual who you might find in your own kid's high school room or even in junior high school room. So it's been the law that prosecutes kids as adults for selling cocaine that is respon sible for making younger and younger people in charge of distributing and selling addictive drugs to the point where an individual under the law would be apprehended by police, scolded for his participation in drug selling, and released to the custody of his mother.

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