Students bring felon Anthony Papa to discuss drug policy reform

Artist and former prison inmate Anthony Papa spent 12 years in prison for passing 4.5 oz. of cocaine in 1984. Addressing a small group of Princeton students Tuesday about the war on drugs, Papa called it "a war on people" and warned about the misuse of drug laws and the often disproportionate punishments they mandate.

"I'm not saying I shouldn't have gone to prison. I maybe should have done some time. Drugs are dangerous," he said. "What's more dangerous is the government interfering in your life when it shouldn't."

Reona Kumagai '06, president of the Princeton chapter of Students for a Sensible Drug Policy — one of the groups that sponsored Papa's visit — argued against mandatory sentencing, saying that judges should make allowances for nonviolent and first-time offenders.

"Judges hate this. They think politicians are meddling in their duty," Kumagai said. "It partly comes from politicians trying to look tough on crime, because that's what they think people want."

Kumagai and Papa said that the Higher Education Act of 2000 denies financial aid to college students convicted of drug charges but makes no provisions about violent crimes such as rape and murder.

"If you smoke marijuana, you could lose your aid," Papa said. "This drug war really reaches the average citizen."

Kumagai explained that the war on drugs was intended to reduce the availability of drugs through harsher penalties. Papa added that drugs are still readily available, even in Sing Sing, the maximum-security prison in which he served.

"If you can't control drugs in a maximum-security prison, how can the government control drugs in a free society?" he said. Many people who enter prison relatively drug-free often become more involved while they are incarcerated, he added.

Nonetheless, Papa avoided drugs in prison and educated himself instead. He earned two degrees, discovered art and developed the political awareness to become an activist upon release in 1997.

Before his crime — his first offense — Papa described himself as "a regular Joe" who worked 12 hours a day installing radios. Desperate for money, he accepted an offer of $500 to deliver an envelope of cocaine to what turned out to be a police sting.

Now the founder of Mothers of the New York Disappeared — the largest activist group fighting the state's harsh Rockefeller Drug Laws, which were enacted in 1973 — he recalled how discovering art in prison ultimately saved his life.

"In 1988, I painted a self-portrait entitled '15 to Life,'" he said, referring to the minimum sentence the Rockefeller Laws required for drug offenders. "I picked up a mirror and saw an individual that was going to spend the most productive years of his life in a cage."

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When the portrait ended up at the Whitney Museum of American Art seven years later, the resulting public sympathy on his behalf induced Governor George Pataki to grant Papa clemency.

"I literally painted my way out of prison," Papa said. "I discovered art as a weapon of the oppressed against the oppressors."