Len Bias and the prison population

I seem to be on a "prison kick" lately. This is the third straight post on the subject.  I was compelled to do so after watching again the ESPN 30-in-30 documentary on the life and death of former Maryland basketball great Len Bias.

If you have not seen it, I would highly recommend it. All of the 30-in-30 movies are very well done, some serious, some humorous. This one on Bias talks about his dying after using what could have been crack or pure cocaine for the first time at a party. It would be his last.

Two things resulted from his death. Many have told his mother, who you can tell is an intelligent, godly woman, that they stopped using cocaine and drugs after Bias' death.  It was a big thing to use cocaine recreationally, but that changed almost instantly in June 1986.

The other is the swift passage of the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act that many believe ushered in a system of mandatory sentences that caused the prison population to increase exponentially.  These mandatory sentences brought about by the "war on drugs" resulted from political posturing and wanting to look "tough on crime." In the end all it really did was arrest and imprison a bunch of middle men (the dealers), most of them black, and make a bad problem worse.

Now, as I mentioned in a previous blog, there are nearly 2.4 million prisoners in the U.S. It was not that Len Bias died, but the way he died that has likely been a direct cause of that number. It's amazing to think about.