Last Monday, William Agius was jailed for three years, fined and had his property confiscated. The case goes back to 2004, when Agius – then an 18-year-old drug user – was caught red-handed trafficking thousands of ecstasy pills. It didn’t help that a primary school happened to be passing by when he was arrested.
Like very many others, I feel sorry for Agius. Three years in prison and the confiscation of all that he has worked for may well break him, especially since they come at such a critical age. Still, I understand that, in the words of Agius’s own defence counsel, the court had its hands tied. The laws of Malta are harsh on drug trafficking, and no court can invent its own laws. In the event, Judge Antonio Mizzi was both exceptionally lenient and forward-looking.
Much has been made of the fact that Agius is now reformed. He made it through drug rehab several years ago and has since been clean. He also started his own business and generally got his life together. The court was right to take all of that into account, and yet its very compassion exposes some of the deepest-set problems with the system.
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It is easy to empathise with Agius. He happens to be a soft-spoken man who makes all the right noises, so to say. It helps that in some of the interviews he gave he was surrounded by his family. Throughout, he came across as a normal person who, at one point in his past, dealt drugs.
Prison is full of such men and women. Drug-related offences account for almost half of the prison population. Many among that number were convicted in their late teens and 20s. Some are serving very long sentences. If they’re lucky, they will leave prison penniless, uneducated and socially isolated in their 40s or 50s.
Meanwhile, they are made to endure a regime that professes to be correctional, but is in truth premised on suffering. Prisoners are expected not just to be there, but to be there dreadfully. They are made to eat bad food, to spend time and sleep in primitive cells and to suffer all manner of humiliation by the system and by fellow prisoners. When they do get the chance to be productive, it’s usually glorified slave labour.
That we should uphold such a system at all deserves a think. That we apply it to young men and women who are hired, often at difficult times when they themselves are users, to be drug couriers, deserves a bit more than that.
Is it morally defensible for the State to destroy the lives of people – reformed or not – who make errors of judgement in difficult circumstances at a young age?
I say ‘uphold’, because the laws that tied Judge Mizzi’s hands and landed Agius in prison were enacted by a democratically-elected parliament and upheld by popular consensus. Generally, the feeling in Malta is that the war on drugs must be vicious, ruthless and unforgiving – no matter how many lives it eats up in the process.
There are voices to the contrary. Take the Global Commission on Drug Policy, an organisation that includes names like Kofi Annan, Richard Branson, and (until his death in 2012) Carlos Fuentes. It consistently argues that it is wrong to use the people involved in the lower ends of the drug market (farmers, couriers, etc) as a kind of cannon fodder in the war on drugs.
In the words of a 2011 Commission report, “arresting and incarcerating tens of millions of these people in recent decades has filled prisons and destroyed lives and families without reducing the availability of illicit drugs or the power of criminal organisations”.
The last point is important, because part of the foolishness of the war on drugs in its current design is that it produces little to no dividend. Illicit drugs are easily available and there seems to be no shortage of hands who are prepared to risk long prison sentences to traffic them. The reason for this is also why so many feel sorry for Agius.
A good part of those involved in drug dealing on the streets are young men and women who are themselves users. Likewise, drug mules tend to be people who find themselves swept by the lure of easy money. Agius was such a type when he was arrested 14 years ago. The supply of young, misguided and addiction-damaged pawns is so good that there will never be any shortage, no matter how savage the sentences.
Agius’s case feels worse, because the man is reformed. But what if he weren’t? How exactly would a long (he could have been jailed for up to 20 years) sentence have helped him? Is it morally defensible for the State to destroy the lives of people – reformed or not – who make errors of judgement in difficult circumstances at a young age?
There are dozens of prisoners rotting away in Corradino who would have become William Agius. They would have had a better chance and incentive to reform as free men and women. To paraphrase Branson, if this kind of drug war were a business, we’d have shut it down ages ago.
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