PROVIDENCE — As summer dawned on Smith Hill in 1988, panic was escalating.

It was the height of the Reagan-era war on drugs and Rhode Island, like other states, believed it was grappling with a serious social problem.

Prosecutors reported that “heroin is out of control in Providence.” The state police publicly labeled Rhode Island “a mecca for drug salesmen.” An editorial in The Providence Journal opined that “such a situation has outraged the population.”

“Something had to be done” to halt the drug epidemic in urban communities, Providence Sen. Harold M. Metts, then a representative, remembers thinking.

Lawmakers responded by passing a package of bills cracking down on narcotics crimes, including one that imposed tougher sentences for certain drug crimes: a minimum of 10 years imprisonment for those convicted of selling or planning to sell an ounce or more of heroin or cocaine. Possessing larger quantities carried a mandatory minimum of 20 years. Bail wasn’t an option.

The law-enforcement community hailed the legislation as the muscle that would take down drug kingpins and dismantle Rhode Island’s drug trade from the top down.

But as the years wore on and the new rules were tested, Metts and others who initially favored the bill, say it became clear they had “gone overboard out of fear.” Instead of drug lords, it was the addicts and low-level street dealers who found themselves facing long prison stays.

Now, two decades later, teenagers and 20-somethings who were toddlers when the laws first passed are routinely sent to prison for first-time, non-violent offenses.

“That’s the law we passed,” Metts said.

For now at least, that’s true. But legislation — revived after it was vetoed by the governor last year — would repeal mandatory minimum sentences for certain drug crimes, restoring discretion to the state’s judges and limiting prison stays to 30 years. The Senate green-lighted the change earlier this month. The House is expected to pass it as early as this afternoon.

“It just doesn’t make sense to lock people up for that long for nonviolent offenses. The prisons in our state are overcrowded, so it’s not sensible financially either and it’s non-rehabilitative,” Jim Gillen, director of the Rhode Island Council for Addiction Recovery, said last week.

Gillen said he’s seen dozens of drug addicts sent to Rhode Island prisons –– the Adult Correctional Institutions reports that more than 70 percent of its inmates suffer from substance-abuse problems –– when what they really need is a treatment program that would help clean up their lives and make the streets safer in the long run. Changing the law would also make headway against the state’s enormous budget deficit, he said last week.

But the state police maintain that the law is a critical deterrent that keeps Rhode Island drug traffic under control. As a former undercover officer and one-time head of the department’s drug task force, Maj. Stephen O’Donnell has seen that effect firsthand on the streets.

“There is no question in my mind either professionally or personally that these sentencing guidelines affect the way a lot of these people operate,” he said.

Mandatory minimum laws specifically target dealers, so they help choke off the supply chain, he said. When arrests happen, strong sentences keep dealers off the streets longer.

“If you’re using a drug for yourself that’s one thing, but when you’re selling it, you’re perverting not just one but hundreds of people and that’s part of the real problem,” O’Donnell said.

Direct Action for Rights and Equality, a Providence civil-rights group, says the more troublesome part of mandatory minimums is that they prevent judges from using discretion in sentencing, effectively tying their hands. The court is not allowed to weigh personal circumstances, such as being a first-time offender.

Neither the attorney general’s office nor the state’s Corrections Department has taken a position on the issue, though Michael J. Healey, spokesman for Attorney General Patrick C. Lynch, said that “with very few exceptions, Lynch supports giving judges maximum discretion” in sentencing.

O’Donnell says it’s misleading to imply that judges have no discretion. The state’s reliance on two-part sentencing — prison time versus suspended sentences — already gives the judicial system ample discretion, he argues. Faced with a first-time arrest, a judge could (and they regularly do) impose the required 10-year sentence, while allowing the offender to serve little or no time in prison.

Roger Williams University School of Law Associate Dean David M. Zlotnick, a former federal prosecutor and one-time litigation director for the national advocacy organization Families Against Mandatory Minimums, says that even a suspended 10-year sentence is unduly stringent. It “hangs over [an offender’s] head,” clogs the probation system and costs taxpayers money.

“To pick out a group of largely nonviolent offenders and give them long terms like that doesn’t really bear a close resemblance to public safety,” Zlotnick said.

In recent years, more than a dozen states have begun scaling back or doing away with mandatory minimum laws, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

The most often cited example is Michigan, which once boasted some of the harshest laws in the country. Michigan did away with those mandates in 2002 and saved about $41 million in the first year alone while easing prison crowding and reporting no major spike in crime, according to Families Against Mandatory Minimums. Massachusetts is considering changes similar to Rhode Island’s proposal.

Changes are afoot on the federal level as well. Late last year, the U.S. Supreme Court and the U.S. Sentencing Commission voted to allow judges to retroactively reduce drug sentences for some federal inmates.

If the Rhode Island House passes the law this week, it would again be up to Governor Carcieri to decide the fate of the state’s sentencing guidelines.

In his veto message last summer, Carcieri said what he found most disturbing about the proposed change is that it imposed a maximum sentence of 30 years for most serious offenders, thus further restricting, not freeing up, judges.

“This law may stop the judiciary from sentencing the worst offenders to appropriate sentencing,” Carcieri said.

The Carcieri administration won’t say whether it plans a repeat of last year’s veto. Metts and House sponsor Joseph S. Almeida, D-Providence, say it’s not yet clear whether lawmakers have the votes necessary for an override. Last year, the Assembly declined to override that veto when it came back for a one-day special session.

“It’s a hard issue,” Metts concedes. “People want to be tough on crime. It looks good for any elected official to be tough on crime. But given budget realities I think we need to move beyond our fears. We need to look at giving judges discretion back and we need to implement this.”

cneedham@projo.com