Profiling is a law enforcement tactic that inevitably generates controversy, but recent measures being considered by Louisiana state legislature this year indicate that while some forms of profiling are here to stay, the means for identifying potential criminals might be getting more elaborate and—proponents of the bill claim—more objective. In July of 2011, the Louisiana State Legislature's House Committee for Transportation, Highways, and Public Works passed a special bill which, if approved by the House as a whole, would add the label "Drug Offender" to the driver's licenses of motorists convicted of repeat felony drug charges.
The measure was introduced by representative Rickey Hardy, a Democrat from the Lafayette district, who asserts that House Bill 139 would alert officers to the potential greater danger they might encounter during routine traffic stops of convicted drug felons. According to Hardy, it would "give the officer who would stop that person a heads-up who he's dealing with, to let him know that person has been involved in criminal activity and might be armed." House Bill 139 would, in essence, allow labeling similar to that already required for those convicted of sex crimes, whose licenses bear the words "Sex Offender" in bright colors. One advocate of the bill, police Major Dewayne White, agrees that the legislation would help officers stay safer while also doing their jobs more effectively.
While Shreveport representative Barbara Norton raised the only public objection to the bill—questioning whether it constitutes excessive punishment for people who have already paid their debt to society—others are concerned that the bill represents simply another missed opportunity for government to put greater time and effort into more the pressing social ills created by drug activity. Shreveport drug rehabs and facilities in other cities are better suited to deal with these sorts of issues, she said.
Jeff Gordon, Lead Counselor at the Narconon Riverbend Retreat, raises the concern that such punitive measures do little to get at the heart of our culture's drug problems; as Gordon puts it, "Drug-related crime is quite often the result of addiction, and addiction requires effective treatment techniques. Labeling offenders guilty for life is certainly not an effective means of rehabilitation."
Rehabs in Louisiana feel they can do a better job at rehabilitating addicts than prisons can.
