A study by the Democrats in the State Senate found that New York imposed the harshest penalties in the nation for low-level drug offenders. It found that 32 states, including Texas and Florida, offer probation to nonviolent offenders who sell small amounts of drugs, and that New York was the only state that required more than three years in prison for such offenses.

Both sides compromised:

To reach a compromise, the Senate and Governor Pataki gave up on their calls to increase penalties in some areas for drug kingpins, drug dealers who use children as couriers and drug dealers who use guns. The Assembly gave up its calls to give judges the discretion to sentence offenders to treatment instead of prison, to allow more inmates to seek early release and to add more treatment options.

More complaints about the "reform" bill:"

Robert Gangi, the executive director of Correctional Association of New York, a prison monitoring group, said that the current system was still weighted in favor of prosecutors. "What mandatory sentencing means is that judges no longer have the authority to make the threshold decision of whether someone should be incarcerated or not," he said. "We're supposed to have an adversarial system: the defense attorney on one side, the D.A. on the other side. And the judge is the neutral arbiter who is supposed to weigh their claims. What mandatory sentencing does is stack the deck in favor of one side in the adversarial process, and that is the prosecutors."

Blacks and hispanics account for 90% of those serving drug sentences. More on the numbers is here.

Nonetheless, activists are to be praised for not giving up. Some background on their efforts is here. and here. The dissension between Pataki and Assembly Democrats is here. On the laws themselves, here and here.