The First Step Act would bring much needed common sense back into the courtroom.

Serving as a police officer for over 28 years and ultimately as chief of police in Greenville, I have spent a great deal of my career battling illegal drugs. I’ve been on the front lines and seen the devastating impact the drug trade can have on families and neighborhoods. I’ve also arrested or overseen the arrest of hundreds of drug offenders. Some were responsible for major operations while others were addicts selling small amounts of painkillers, meth, cocaine or heroin to feed their own habits. And I noticed a major problem. In North Carolina, the law often doesn’t see a difference between these offenders: all are sent to prison for years on mandatory minimums.

After decades of fighting the war on drugs, we are seeing that the lock-’em up strategy of the past just isn’t working. Overly long prison sentences break up families, waste the state’s money, and can increase the chances that a person will re-offend. North Carolina’s mandatory minimums are among the most extreme sentencing schemes for drug offenses in the country, and it’s hurting us.

The legislature is now considering the North Carolina First Step Act (SB 404), a bill that would bring much needed common sense back into the courtroom. Called “safety valve” legislation, it would allow judges to decide whether or not to apply a mandatory minimum in a drug case. Instead of being locked into a years-long mandatory minimum, North Carolina judges would be permitted to carefully evaluate each drug offender, her or his crime, the likelihood that they will re-offend, and other circumstances. If a judge determines it would be compatible with public safety, they could issue a sentence that includes probation, drug treatment, or a shorter time in prison. That’s a sensible way to fight illegal drugs — provide opportunities for treatment as part of our state justice system’s response to crime.

Indeed, a safety-valve bill was precisely what the General Assembly’s bipartisan Task Force on Sentencing Reforms for Opioid Drug Convictions recommended late last year as its top reform.

North Carolina’s mandatory minimums have been in place for decades, but they have had little to no impact on drug crime. Opioid addiction has continued to rise. In fact, from 1999 to 2017, opioid deaths increased almost 800 percent in North Carolina. The failure of incarceration to stop the opioid crisis shouldn’t be surprising because study after study shows that longer prison sentences don’t reduce the rates of drug use or addiction. Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Virginia have all come to see mandatory minimums’ shortcomings — these states and many others have passed safety valve bills like the one before our legislature.

The federal system instituted a safety valve in 1994 and has since applied it to over 80,000 offenders. It has been so successful that Congress voted to expand the federal safety valve by an overwhelming majority at the end of 2018—a reform co-sponsored by North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis and supported by President Trump.

In addition to giving judges choices beyond mandatory minimums, the safety valve bill would reduce the growth of North Carolina’s prison system, now at 36,600 prisoners, more than double the population in 1980. The state spent $1.55 billion on corrections in fiscal year 2016-2017 alone. We need to bring these numbers down in a smart and safe way. A safety valve is a great place to start. Times have changed — we have an opportunity to get this right.

Hassan Aden is the former police chief of the Greenville Police Department. A member of Law Enforcement Leaders to Reduce Crime & Incarceration, Aden serves as the deputy federal monitor overseeing the consent decree monitoring teams in Seattle, Cleveland and Baltimore.