Drug War Facts and Statistics
Here are two sites with some interesting facts and statistics on the insane "war on drugs".- add link that over 50 percent of patriot act arrests for for drug war crimes and less then 1 percent for terrorist crimes
- add link that over 50 percent of TSA seisures are for drug war crimes and a large number or for guns and again less then 1 percent for terrorist crimes
- add foxs and other mexican presidents statement to legalize drugs
- add legalization of small amounts of drugs in mexico
- In this aricle we see that most Americans are in Federal Prisons for
victimless drug war crimes, followed by victimless weapons violations crimes, followed by
victimless immigration violations.
Only after those victimless crimes are American in prisons for real crimes that hurt people
Most people are in prison for victimless drug war crimes
After victimless drug war crimes most people are in prison for weapons violations
- More than half of federal prisoners are incarcerated for victimless drug war crimes in 2010
The Drug War And Mass Incarceration By The Numbers
April 2013
articleMore than half of federal prisoners are incarcerated for drug crimes in 2010, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and that number has only just dipped below 50 percent in 2011.
- 50% of the people in Federal prisons are there for victimless drug war crimes
George F. Will, Washington Post
June 2013
articleNo wonder that the federal prison population — currently approximately 219,000, about half serving drug sentences — has expanded 51 percent since 2000 and federal prisons are at 138 percent of their supposed capacity.
- 8% of the people in all American prisons are
there for victimless marijuana crimes
Should Pot Be Legal?
THOMAS G. DONLAN , Barrons
June, 2013
articleSome 663,000 people were arrested for marijuana possession in 2011, ... Nationwide, some 128,000 people are in state or federal prisons for marijuana offenses. That's 8% of all U.S. prisoners.
- 60,000 drug war deaths in Mexico under Felipe Calderon
Mexican daily: Nearly 60,000 drug war deaths under Calderon
Fox News Latino
November 01, 2012
articleOrganized crime-related violence has claimed 57,449 lives in Mexico during the presidency of Felipe Calderon, whose six-year term ends on Dec. 1, according to a tally published Thursday by the Milenio daily.
- US jails more people per capita then any other country in the world
List of countries by incarceration rate
wikipedia
July, 2013
articleAmerica, the US and the USA jail more people per capita then any other country in the world.
On a per capita basis (not by prison population) America jails 1.5 times as many people as Russia, 3.4 times as many people as Mexico, 4.8 times as many people as England and 6.3 times as many people as Canada.
Rank Country (or dependent territory) Prisoners per
100,000
population1 United States 716 5 Cuba 510 8 Russia 484 32 Ukraine 311 36 Kazakhstan 295 37 South Africa 289 67 Mexico 209 101 England 148 133 Canada 114 144 France 101 166 Germany 80 196 Japan 54 - By raw numbers or prison population numbers
the USA has more people in prison then any other country in the world.
World prison populations
BBC News
month of article, year
articleThe USA has the worlds largest prison population with 2,193,798 in American prisons.
China is second with 1,548,498 prisoners, followed by Russia with 874,161 prisoners.
By straight numbers (not on a per capita basis) America jails 1.4 times as many people as China, 2.5 times as many people as Russia, 10.2 times as many people as Mexico, and 27.4 times as many people as England.
- 50% of the people jailed for drug war crimes are Blacks
The Drug War And Mass Incarceration By The Numbers
April 2013
articleBlacks make up 50 percent of the state and local prisoners incarcerated for drug crimes. Black kids are 10 times more likely to be arrested for drug crimes than white ones -- even though white kids are more likely to abuse drugs.
Drug War Articles to back up the facts
Leahy and Paul plan on mandatory sentencing makes sense
SourceGeorge Will says 50% of convicts are for victimless drug war crimes
In this editorial George Will says about 50 percent of the people in Federal prisons are there for victimless drug war crimes.
I recently posted another article from Barrons that said about 8 percent of the people in American prisons are there for victimless marijuana drug war crimes.
I usually say about two thirds or 66 percent of the people in Federal prisons are there for victimless drug war crimes. I think I got that figure from Reason Magazine.
Leahy and Paul plan on mandatory sentencing makes sense
By George F. Will, Published: June 5 E-mail the writer
Libertarians believe government should have a compelling reason before it restricts an individual’s liberty. Today’s liberals believe almost any reason will do, because liberty is less important than equality, fraternity, fighting obesity and many other aspirations. Now, however, one of the most senior and liberal U.S. senators and one of the most junior and libertarian have a proposal that could slow and even repair some of the fraying of society.
Seven-term Democrat Pat Leahy’s 38 Senate years have made him Judiciary Committee chairman. Republican Rand Paul is in his third Senate year. They hope to reduce the cruelty, irrationality and cost of the current regime of mandatory minimum sentences for federal crimes.
Such crimes are multiplying at a rate of more than 500 a decade, even though the Constitution explicitly authorizes Congress to criminalize only a few activities that are national in nature (e.g., counterfeiting, treason, crimes on the high seas). The federal government, having failed at core functions, such as fairly administering a rational revenue system, acts like a sheriff with attention-deficit disorder, haphazardly criminalizing this and that behavior in order to express righteous alarm about various wrongs that excite attention.
Approximately 80,000 people are sentenced in federal courts each year. There are an estimated 4,500 federal criminal statutes and tens of thousands of regulations backed by criminal penalties, including incarceration. There can be felony penalties for violating arcane regulations that do not give clear notice of behavior that is prescribed or proscribed. This violates the mens rea requirement — people deserve criminal punishment only if they intentionally engage in conduct that is inherently wrong or that they know to be illegal. No wonder that the federal prison population — currently approximately 219,000, about half serving drug sentences — has expanded 51 percent since 2000 and federal prisons are at 138 percent of their supposed capacity.
The Leahy-Paul measure would expand to all federal crimes the discretion federal judges have in many drug cases to impose sentences less than the mandatory minimums. This would, as Leahy says, allow judges — most of whom oppose mandatory minimums — to judge. Paul says mandatory minimum sentences, in the context of the proliferation of federal crimes, undermine federalism, the separation of powers and “the bedrock principle that people should be treated as individuals.”
Almost everyone who enters the desensitizing world of U.S. prisons is going to return to society, and many will have been socially handicapped by the experience. Until the 1970s, about 100 per 100,000 Americans were in prison. Today 700 per 100,000 are. America has nearly 5 percent of the world’s population but almost 25 percent of its prisoners. African Americans are 13 percent of the nation’s population but 37 percent of the prison population, and one in three African American men spends time incarcerated. All this takes a staggering toll on shattered families and disordered neighborhoods.
The House Judiciary Committee has created an Over-Criminalization Task Force. Its members should read “Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent,” by Harvey Silverglate, a libertarian lawyer whose book argues that prosecutors could indict most of us for three felonies a day. And the task force should read the short essay “Ham Sandwich Nation: Due Process When Everything Is a Crime” by Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a professor of law at the University of Tennessee. Given the axiom that a competent prosecutor can persuade a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich, and given the reality of prosecutorial abuse — particularly, compelling plea bargains by overcharging with “kitchen sink” indictments — Reynolds believes “the decision to charge a person criminally should itself undergo some degree of due process scrutiny.”
He also suggests banning plea bargains: “An understanding that every criminal charge filed would have to be either backed up in open court or ignominiously dropped would significantly reduce the incentive to overcharge. . . . Our criminal justice system, as presently practiced, is basically a plea-bargain system with actual trials of guilt or innocence a bit of showy froth floating on top.”
U.S. prosecutors win more than 90 percent of their cases, 97 percent of those without complete trials. British and Canadian prosecutors win significantly less, and for many offenses, the sentences in those nations are less severe.
Making mandatory minimums less severe would lessen the power of prosecutors to pressure defendants by overcharging them in order to expose them to draconian penalties. The Leahy-Paul measure is a way to begin reforming a criminal justice system in which justice is a diminishing component.
Read more from George F. Will’s archive or follow him on Facebook.
Should Pot Be Legal?
Barrons article - Should Pot Be Legal?According to this article 8% of the people in all American prisons are there for victimless marijuana crimes. That is 128,000 people.
I often say that two thirds of the people in Federal prisons are there for victimless drug war crimes. I got the figure out of a Libertarian magazine, probably Reason or Liberty.
The article also says "663,000 people were arrested for marijuana possession in 2011" That is about one forth of one percent of the US population of 300 million. Or about one half of a percent of the adult US population.
Should Pot Be Legal?
By THOMAS G. DONLAN | MORE ARTICLES BY AUTHOR
Legalizing marijuana will hurt drug lords, help cash-strapped states, and ease burdens on police and prisons. Yet D.C. dithers.
America's 40-year crawl toward legalization of marijuana is picking up speed. Twenty-six states have taken steps toward legalization, some quite bold. Just last week, Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper made one of the biggest moves yet, signing a package of bills addressing how marijuana will be grown, sold, taxed, and used. The measures, which follow Colorado voters' approval of legalization last fall, form the cornerstone of the nation's first fully legal market for pot. Come Jan. 1, Colorado residents over 21 will be allowed to buy marijuana at retail stores and smoke it for their pleasure. The state of Washington, where voters also passed a referendum to legalize marijuana, will be next. If all goes well with those pioneering efforts, it may be only a matter of time before more states follow.
Proponents say Americans should be allowed to smoke cannabis as a matter of basic personal freedom, adding that a society that enjoys legal whiskey, beer, wine, and tobacco has no business outlawing a recreational drug like pot that has fewer unhealthy side effects. After all, tens of millions of Americans enjoy smoking marijuana, if illegally.
It's Prohibition all over again. That Gatsby-era law gave rise to the Mafia, rampant crime, and in the end, increased drinking. As Rep. Steve Cohen (D., Tenn.) put it recently, "This is the time to remedy this prohibition."
Plenty of people agree. The Pew Research Center recently found that 52% of Americans support legalized possession of small quantities of marijuana. It was the first time a national poll produced a majority against pot prohibition, although the Gallup Poll and other national polls are coming close. The Pew survey found that nearly every group in the country is part of the gradual change in public attitudes -- men, women, whites, blacks, rich, and poor.
It's not just about the right to light up. With the nation's retail marijuana market estimated at about $30 billion, legalization also would bring some important economic benefits. It could lead to sharply lower prices, striking a blow to the Mexican drug cartels and American street gangs. Pot could be produced in the U.S. for much less than Mexican pot produced illegally. By some estimates, illegality adds 50% to marijuana's prices. If both countries legalized the drug, Mexicans might grow a lot of it and sell it to American consumers, but the inexpensive legal product would not draw the attention of the ultraviolent Mexican drug traffickers any more than Mexican tomatoes do.
Legalization also could bring some relief to cash-strapped states. Marijuana taxes would join levies on liquor, tobacco, gambling, and other pursuits that once were banned. A report prepared for the libertarian Cato Institute suggests states could raise a total of about $3 billion from marijuana taxes, and other estimates are even higher. California alone could pull in $1.4 billion a year, a state tax authority has projected. That may seem minor compared with a state budget approaching $100 billion, but it would top the $1.3 billion that California now gets from alcohol and tobacco taxes combined.
Colorado may get about $100 million a year in tax revenue, and Washington could get $310 million. But there is wide disagreement on appropriate tax rates for marijuana. Colorado will be asking voters to approve two sales taxes totaling 25%, while Washington is looking to tax producers, sellers, and buyers -- for a total haul of 75%. That might be so high that it keeps the underground market alive. [Of course if states tax the krap out of marijuana and charge black market prices for legal marijuana with the state governments getting the profits that used to go to the drug cartels, the crime that is caused by black market drugs will continue. The reason the drug war causes crime is because of the black market it creates.]
Unquestionably, a loosening of marijuana laws would ease burdens on law enforcement. Some 663,000 people were arrested for marijuana possession in 2011, up 32% since 1995. In New York, according to the pro-legalization Drug Policy Center, a pot bust typically requires 2.5 hours of a policeman's time. [And cops LOVE that because it means OVERTIME PAY!!!!!] Until Mayor Michael Bloomberg changed the policy in February, the arrested automatically spent a night in the police lockup. Nationwide, some 128,000 people are in state or federal prisons for marijuana offenses. That's 8% of all U.S. prisoners.
Norm Stamper, former chief of the Seattle Police Department, thinks Washington's new law will be a big help. "It will give the police an opportunity to focus much more time, energy, and imagination on going after predatory criminals," he says. Legalization, he adds, also has "opened the door to a much more positive relationship between young people and police."
LITTLE WONDER that more than half of the states have loosened their marijuana rules. Starting with Oregon in 1973, 15 states have decriminalized possession of small amounts of the drug, which means it's illegal but lightly punished, typically with a $100 fine; 18 states and the District of Columbia have legalized marijuana possession and sale for medical purposes, such as easing the pain of cancer. In all, the number of states taking at least one step to liberalize their pot laws is 26. Two more got ready to join last month: The Illinois legislature passed a medical-marijuana bill, and the Vermont legislature passed a decriminalization bill. Both bills await signing by the states' governors.
The federal government, however, has not moved toward legalization, not one bit. [Liar in Chief President Obama has said a number of times he wasn't going to arrest people for medical marijuana, but he continues to send his DEA thugs to California to shake down people for victimless medical marijuana crimes] In fact, the states with medical-marijuana laws are defying or ignoring the federal government, which classifies marijuana as a drug with a high potential for abuse, no currently accepted medical use, and a lack of acceptable safety, even for use under medical supervision. Efforts to persuade regulators to change the classification of marijuana have been rejected over and over, as recently as 2011.
Emboldened by a 2005 Supreme Court ruling that allows federal prohibition to trump state legalization, the feds have arrested owners of some of the medical dispensaries in California, a state that has permitted dispensaries to operate since 1996. It's entirely unclear how Uncle Sam is going to react when retail sales go into full swing in Colorado and Washington. Attorney General Eric Holder has been promising to produce a policy, but nothing has yet emerged from the Justice Department.
To eliminate the conflicts, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican, last month introduced a bill to require the feds to respect state laws on marijuana. "The Herculean effort undertaken by the federal government to prevent the American people from smoking marijuana has undeniably been a colossal failure," he says. Lacking a groundswell of bipartisan support, however, Rohrabacher's bill is considered to have no chance of passage.
"It is likely that we are going to proceed state by state, and that Congress will be unlikely to touch this issue with a pole of any length," says William Galston of the Brookings Institution. "We may very well be a patchwork nation for the next generation."
OTHER STATES WILL JOIN the patchwork as more state officials take a cue from Gavin Newsom, lieutenant governor of California and former mayor of San Francisco. "I was a coward a couple of years ago," he says, referring to the days when he opposed legalization. He switched positions after concluding that legalization would be an important step in his vision for criminal-justice reform.
Newsom, who owns a collection of bars, restaurants, and wineries, also has a more fundamental issue with pot prohibition. "When I'm watching a guy do shots of Jack Daniel's at my bar, I'm thinking, 'That's legal, but a guy at home with his wife on a weekend smoking marijuana is illegal?' It's absurd."
Though he hopes to guide California to legalization, Newsom says the state will first have to improve the regulation of its medical-marijuana dispensaries: "So many of us have had the experience where you're stuck at a traffic light, and you look across the street at a dispensary, and you see a lot of young folks running in and out, and you may even turn the corner and see folks reselling the drug." Until that problem is fixed, he says voters may not believe the state can monitor full legalization.
Another prerequisite: stronger spines in politicians. Many legislators, in California and elsewhere, are fearful of backlashes from antilegalization groups, which warn of increases in crime and harm to youths and families. But eventually, elected officials may come around. Newsom, who is up for re-election in November, hopes to set an example: "If I win and these groups don't come after me, I've got to think some other people will say, 'Hey, they didn't come after him -- maybe it's not as politically toxic as we thought.' "
PERHAPS THE MOST IMPORTANT hurdle for the legalization movement will be the experiences in Colorado and Washington state. If other states are to move toward legalization, these two pioneers will have to demonstrate that legal pot markets can function smoothly and safely.
Though the details of the states' regulations have yet to be hammered out, the bottom line for consumers in both states is similar: If you are over 21, you'll be able to freely buy pot at licensed retail outlets. Already, you can possess as much as an ounce of marijuana, so long as you don't use it in public.
The bills signed by Colorado's governor last week included provisions for curbing drugged driving: You can't get behind the wheel if your blood contains more than five nanograms per milliliter of tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, marijuana's key component. A pot smoker can get to that level with as little as one puff, but the numbers decline rapidly over the next three hours, says the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Colorado also took steps to prevent marijuana use among youths, making it a crime to share pot with someone under 21 and banning marketing that seems aimed at kids. It's easy to see why the state is worried. The National Survey on Drug Use and Health estimated that 2.6 million Americans had tried marijuana for the first time in 2011, and their average age was 17. The new pot smokers were more numerous than the 2.4 million Americans who smoked tobacco cigarettes for the first time in 2011, whose average age was also 17. Alcohol was still the most popular among recreational substances, with 4.7 million Americans estimated to have taken their first drink in 2011 -- 83% of them younger than age 21.
The push for marijuana legalization can't afford any slip-ups by Colorado or Washington in dealing with the youth population or anything else. "You're one tragedy away in Colorado and Washington from it not being an inevitability," says California's Newsom. On the other hand, he says, success in those states would bode well for legalization in his state and others.
Last month, the legalization movement got a lift from beyond U.S. borders. The Organization of American States, a consortium of nations in North, Central, and South America, released a report suggesting the legalization of marijuana be considered as a step in the war on drugs.
The last president of Mexico, Felip Calderón, had done something of the same. He was the first Mexican president to broach the idea of drug legalization while still in office. And he wasn't just talking about Mexico. "Our neighbor is the largest consumer of drugs in the world," Calderón said in 2011. "And everybody wants to sell him drugs though our doors and windows. If the consumption of drugs cannot be limited, then decision makers must seek more solutions -- including market alternatives -- in order to reduce the astronomical earnings of criminal organizations." [And just last week, probably after this article was released former Mexican President Vicente Fox who now lives in the US said that American should legalize marijuana]
Calderón left office last year, and his successor, Enrique Peña Nieto, flatly opposes legalization of drugs. Marijuana use, he says, often leads users to harder drugs. Nieto's position is no doubt heartening to drug lords, whose money makes them very powerful in Mexican politics. Legalization in Mexico, it's fair to say, faces formidably long odds.
THE U.S. GOVERNMENT, for its part, should at least move to eliminate the widespread confusion between state and federal laws over marijuana use, which has been reaching absurd proportions. Banks in California, for instance, are so unclear about where things stand that they won't let medical-marijuana dispensaries open accounts. As a result, many of the stores are run as cash businesses, inviting robberies. To pay taxes, some are showing up at the state's revenue department with bags of cash.
Whether Congress realizes it or not, a good number of citizens want the problem fixed. The same Pew study that found a majority of people favoring legalization also found that 60% of Americans think the federal government should not enforce its prohibition in states that permit marijuana use. And 72% agreed with the proposition that federal enforcement of marijuana laws is not worth the cost.
Rep. Rohrabacher's plan is as good a fix as any. It's straightforward and sensible: The federal government can help enforce antipot laws in states that want them, but it must mind its own business in states that don't want marijuana to be criminal.
Eventually, the federal government may repeal all of its laws against pot use, pot production, and pot dealing.
They could be replaced by laws no tougher than those that apply to liquor. Just as it was with the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, Congress could allow states to continue pot prohibition by local option, or to draft their own regulatory systems.
Given the unwillingness of many in Congress to even talk about marijuana, the day of full repeal is probably far off. But tending to the clumsy conflicts between state and federal governments is something that can and should be addressed right now.
MICHAEL D. VALLO assisted in reporting this story.
Nearly 60,000 drug war deaths under Calderon
SourceMexican daily: Nearly 60,000 drug war deaths under Calderon
Published November 01, 2012
EFE
Organized crime-related violence has claimed 57,449 lives in Mexico during the presidency of Felipe Calderon, whose six-year term ends on Dec. 1, according to a tally published Thursday by the Milenio daily.
Based on its own calculations, the Monterrey-based newspaper also put the number of drug war-related homicides thus far in 2012 at 10,485 and said 888 people were killed in October, the second-lowest monthly total this year.
Seven of Mexico's 32 federal entities accounted for 72 percent of the homicides last month, according to Milenio. In October, the country's most violent state was Guerrero with 145 murders, followed by Chihuahua with 139, Sinaloa with 94 and Nuevo Leon and Jalisco with 68 each.
The states that saw the biggest drop in homicides last month relative to September were Michoacan, Baja California and San Luis Potosi, in that order.
The last time the government updated the country's drug war death toll was on Jan. 11, when it said 47,515 people had been killed in organized crime-related violence between Dec. 1, 2006, and Sept. 30, 2011.
In August, the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity, which poet-turned-peace activist Javier Sicilia founded after his son was murdered by suspected drug-gang members, put the death toll from Mexico's drug war at roughly 70,000.
Calderon, of the conservative National Action Party, or PAN, militarized the struggle against Mexico's heavily armed, well-funded drug mobs shortly after taking office in December 2006, deploying tens of thousands of troops across the country.
The strategy has led to headline-grabbing killings or captures of 25 of the country's 37 most-wanted criminal leaders - including Los Zetas cartel leader Heriberto Lazcano, killed in a shootout with marines on Oct. 7 - but the violence has continued unabated.
Calderon will be succeeded in a month by Enrique Peña Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which will return to power after a 12-year hiatus.
Peña Nieto, who has vowed to bring down the violence during his six-year term, says he will keep the army on the streets in Mexico's most insecure areas while bolstering the Federal Police's capacity to fight crime.
The president-elect has said he will not seek accords or truces with drug gangs, as the PRI is widely suspected of doing in the past.
Calderon suggested in an interview with The New York Times in October 2011 that members of the PRI, which ruled Mexico uninterruptedly for 71 years, would be susceptible to making deals with organized crime the party regained power. EFE
List of countries by incarceration rate
SourceFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
World Prison Populations
SourceHalf of the world's prison population of about nine million is held in the US, China or Russia.
Prison rates in the US are the world's highest, at 724 people per 100,000. In Russia the rate is 581.
At 145 per 100,000, the imprisonment rate of England and Wales is at about the midpoint worldwide.
Many of the lowest rates are in developing countries, but overcrowding can be a serious problem. Kenyan prisons have an occupancy level of 343.7%
Country Prison population US 2,193,798 CHINA 1,548,498 RUSSIA 874,161 BRAZIL 371,482 INDIA 332,112 MEXICO 214,450 UKRAINE 162,602 SOUTH AFRICA 158,501 POLAND 89,546 ENGLAND/WALES 80,002 JAPAN 79,052 KENYA 47,036 TURKEY 65,458 NIGERIA 40,444 AUSTRALIA 25,790 SCOTLAND 6,872 N IRELAND 1,375 SOURCE: International Centre for Prison Studies
The Drug War And Mass Incarceration By The Numbers
SourceThe Huffington Post | By Matt Sledge
Posted: 04/08/2013 7:34 am EDT
NEW YORK -- Despite an increased emphasis on treatment and prevention programs in recent years, the Obama administration in its 2013 budget still requested $25.6 billion in federal spending on the drug war. Of that, $15 billion would go to law enforcement, interdiction and international efforts.
The pro-reform Drug Policy Alliance estimates that when you combine state and local spending on everything from drug-related arrests to prison, the total cost adds up to at least $51 billion per year. Over four decades, the group says, American taxpayers have dished out $1 trillion on the drug war.
What all that money has helped produce -- aside from unchanged drug addiction rates -- is the world's highest incarceration rate. According to the Sentencing Project, 2.2 million Americans are in prison or jail.
More than half of federal prisoners are incarcerated for drug crimes in 2010, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and that number has only just dipped below 50 percent in 2011. Despite more relaxed attitudes among the public at large toward non-violent offenses like marijuana use, the number of people in federal prison for drug offenses spiked from 74,276 in 2000 to 97,472 in 2010, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
The punishment falls disproportionately on people of color. Blacks make up 50 percent of the state and local prisoners incarcerated for drug crimes. Black kids are 10 times more likely to be arrested for drug crimes than white ones -- even though white kids are more likely to abuse drugs.
Victimless drug and gun crimes are why most people are in Federal prisons.
51 percent of federal prison inmates are there for victimless drug war crimes. In the above graph the second highest number of people are in federal prisons for weapons violations. The article didn't give a percent for weapons violations.
Eric Holder is cutting federal drug sentences. That will make a small dent in the U.S. prison population.
By Dylan Matthews, Published: August 12 at 2:50 pm
Populations at federal prisons have grown, but state prisons are the real problem.
Attorney General Eric Holder will announce Monday that the Justice Department will no longer charge nonviolent drug offenders with serious crimes that subject them to long, mandatory minimum sentences in the federal prison system. As my colleague Sari Horwitz explains, Holder “is giving new instructions to federal prosecutors on how they should write their criminal complaints when charging low-level drug offenders, to avoid triggering the mandatory minimum sentences.”
He’s also expected to call for the expanded use of prison alternatives, such as probation or house arrest, for nonviolent offenders and for lower sentences for elderly inmates. And he’ll endorse legislation by Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Pat Leahy (D-Vt.), Mike Lee (R-Utah), and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) that would increase federal judges’ flexibility in sentencing nonviolent drug offenders.
The changes Holder wants will likely make a big difference at the federal level. But that won’t be enough to solve America’s mass incarceration problem.
Focusing on drug offenses is a smart way to go about reducing the federal incarceration rate. According to data in Why Are So Many Americans in Prison?, a new book by UC – Berkeley’s Steven Raphael and UCLA’s Michael Stoll, the most serious charge for 51 percent of federal inmates in 2010 was a drug offense. By comparison, homicide was the most serious charge for only 1 percent, and robbery was the most serious charge against 4 percent.
Tougher drug sentencing accounts for much of the increase in the incarceration rate. “If you go back and decompose what caused growth in the federal prison system since 1984, a large chunk can be explained by drug offenses, around 45 percent,” Raphael says. The other big category accounting for the federal increase is weapons charges, such as the five-year mandatory minimum faced by drug offenders caught with guns. Raphael estimates that that accounts for 18 to 19 percent of the increase.
There’s also been an increase in incarcerations on immigration charges, with the rest of the increase in other areas. But there’s no doubt that the biggest category of crime behind the increase in the federal incarceration rate is drugs. Easing up on drug sentencing would make a big dent.
The states are different
But the federal system isn’t really where the action is. The most recent Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) estimates find that there are 1,353,198 people incarcerated at the state level and 217,815 incarcerated federally. So about 13.9 percent of U.S. prisoners are in federal institutions; the other 86.1 percent are in state facilities. And most prisoners at the state level are not there for drug crimes.
In 2004, about 20 percent of state-level inmates were incarcerated on drug convictions, Raphael and Stoll find. Compared with the federal population, those incarcerated at the state level are much likelier to have committed violent offenses. In 2004, 14 percent were in prison for homicide, 9 percent for rape or sexual assault, 12 percent for robbery and 8 percent for aggravated assault. In 2011, it was much the same, according to BJS stats on state inmates serving sentences of a year or more. Fifty-three percent of inmates were in prison for violent offenses, 18.3 percent for property crimes, 10.6 percent for “public order” offenses such as drunk driving, weapons possession or vice offenses, and 16.8 percent for drug convictions.
Bjs state breakdown
Raphael and Stoll’s estimates of what’s accounting for the higher incarceration rates suggest that violent crimes are a big part of the state-level story. They find that harsher sentencing for violent offenders explains 48 percent of growth in incarceration rates, compared with about 22 percent attributable to increases in drug sentencing, and 15 percent due to increases in property crime and other sentences.
Then again, most people who go through state criminal justice systems do so on drug offenses. If you look at admission rates, rather than incarceration rates, at the state level, drugs become a much bigger part of the picture. For admissions, Raphael and Stoll find “relatively modest increases for violent crimes and property crimes and pronounced increases for drug offenses, parole violations, and other less serious crime.” And while higher admissions for less serious crimes with shorter sentences don’t affect the incarceration rate as much as increases in sentencing for serious crimes, they do dramatically affect the lives of those admitted, who have to find work as ex-offenders and live with the sundry restrictions states impose upon those who’ve served time.
It’s not hopeless
Holder is taking a fairly plausible approach to reducing the U.S. incarceration rate at the level where he can effect it. But that’s not the level that matters most, and if we were to get serious about reducing the state-level incarceration and admissions rates, we need to talk not just about reducing sentences for drug crimes but also about reducing prison admissions for drug offenses, and perhaps also lowering sentences for property crime and even violent offenses, particularly robbery.
There has been growing enthusiasm for reforming state sentencing laws, even backed by many conservatives. The American Legislative Exchange Council has joined the cause, creating model legislation for loosening state mandatory minimum laws. Especially if it’s not just limited to drug offenses, that kind of reform could greatly reduce the state incarceration rate.