Don’t Resist New Prisons, Bennett Pleads : Crime: Because of local opposition to lockups, there’s no place to get pushers out of circulation, the drug czar laments.

WASHINGTON —  National drug control policy director William J. Bennett issued a forceful appeal to lawmakers around the country Thursday, warning that the war on drugs will fail unless leaders can overcome opposition to plans for prison construction.

The expression of federal frustration came as Bennett acknowledged that the Administration’s effort to tackle the drug problem in the nation’s capital has met with “frustrations and setbacks.”

The drug czar said “infuriating” local opposition to proposed new prison sites in the District of Columbia has taught him the “limits of czarness.”

“It’s a question for America,” Bennett said at a news conference. “Do we want drug dealers down the road in the prison or do we want them down the street in the shadows?”

Prison overcrowding presents a major obstacle to the Administration anti-drug strategy, which relies heavily on law enforcement tactics to lock up major drug offenders.

While most cities and states have adopted general blueprints for expansions, particular plans have been torpedoed by the opposition of citizens’ groups and politicians unwilling to accept a prison near their own back yards.

The result, Bennett said Thursday, is a chronic lack of prison space in virtually every municipality in the country. “We could use a little more civic resolve and civic courage on this question,” he said. “If we don’t, everything else is going to fall flat.”

Bennett said he recognized that the problems of prison siting were the result of the “normal political processes of democracy.” But he warned that unless officials were able to rise above such wrangling, “the guys who should be in (prison) are going to be down the street, down the block, in the hallways.”

In the tone of his remarks, Bennett was clearly smarting from scars inflicted during six months of battling with District of Columbia officials over the implementation of the Administration’s unprecedented anti-drug bailout plan for the city.

Bennett’s most ambitious plan to aid the city’s effort--a proposed federally funded 700-bed prison to serve the region--had to be scrapped when local officials vetoed the effort outright. At the same time, a more moderate bid to build a 500-bed detention facility has become mired in debate over where it should be located.

“Whenever a site in the area has been seriously considered, politics has weighed in,” Bennett said. He described the effort as an “infuriating” sign that the nation was refusing to address a “bottom-line issue” in the anti-drug effort.

But in issuing his six-month progress report on the federal effort in Washington, Bennett said the frustrating experience in the city had not caused him to reconsider the law-and-order thrust of the Administration strategy.

Acknowledging that the law enforcement effort had proceeded at “a slower and more halting pace than we would like,” he nevertheless expressed confidence that it would eventually restore “a sense of public order and civility” to the nation’s capital.

The new Administration anti-drug strategy devotes more than $1.5 billion for federal prison construction, but provides nothing for the state and local systems that house the vast majority of drug offenders.

Administration officials contend generally that funding for such non-federal projects remains the responsibility of state and local officials. In recent weeks, however, they have said they are considering a plan to provide supplemental prison-construction aid to the cities hardest hit by drug trafficking.

In issuing his six-month progress report on the federal effort in Washington, Bennett insisted that the drug enforcement plan “is working, albeit at a slower and more halting pace than we would like.”