The War on Drugs and Prison Growth: Limited importance and legislative options [pdf]
harvardjol.com
harvardjol.com
"The five means by which the War on Drugs can drive up incarceration rates (or punishment more generally) considered in Part II are (1) the direct incarceration of drug offenders, (2) the re-incarceration of all types of offenders due to drug-related parole violations, (3) the impact of drug incarcerations on prison admissions instead of prison populations, (4) the extent to which prior drug offenses trigger repeat-offender enhancement, even for non-drug crimes, and (5) the effects of large-scale drug arrests and incarcerations on neighborhood social cohesion, and the connections between social stability and incarceration. "
"The connection here between the War on Drugs, longer criminal records, and increased prosecutorial aggressiveness is fairly straightforward. Increased drug enforcement results in defendants with longer felony records and prosecutors may be more aggressive against such defendants. They may be less willing to plead down felonies to misdemeanor, or to drop cases altogether; to divert to an alternative program, or to drop more serious charges. They may also be more willing to select charges that carry mandatory minimums even when there are viable alternate charges that carry no minimum. Such harshness could reflect increasingly punitive attitudes on the part of prosecutors, perhaps in response to rising crime rates from the 1960s to the 1990s, or to other political and social factors. Or it could be that prosecutors have maintained a relatively constant approach toward charging repeat offenders, but the number of arrestees with long records has grown, thanks in part to drug-related convictions. Note, too, that prosecutors need not be more aggressive just toward those with more convictions, but perhaps also toward those only with more prior arrests, even if some of those arrests never resulted in convictions."
As noted above, despite the theoretical plausibility of all five, the data cautions against putting too much weight on any of them.
And then the author goes on debunking each of them:
While the first two theories — that drug incarcerations and drug-related parole violations drive growth — have received the most attention, they are also the easiest to debunk. and so it follow.
Seems like all the objective data is undermined by the subjectivity of determining what are the "direct" and "indirect" effects.
Note that the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 (which imposed mandatory sentencing guidelines), and the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984 (which eliminated federal parole), came two years before legislation to increase punishments for drug-related crimes.
Similarly, it wasn't the drug war that led the way when states passed reforms limiting/eliminating parole or imposing life sentences for three strikes. In fact, most states don't include drug crimes within the scope of their three strikes laws.
A famous comedian made a deal to avoid that sentence. One that promotes a family values image.
The rate of crime may have dropped, but the kind of crime did not, and prison gangs certainly haven't diminished in size or scope. People seem to forget that going to prison is a way of life to many people. Keeping those people 'off the streets' is basically the prosecutor's primary role.
That would tend to make sense given that prison is not a deterrent, in the sense that studies have shown doesn't seem to make people less willing to commit crimes, whereas the state of being in prison certainly does restrict their ability to do so.
(of course, that doesn't make them a good idea!)
Prosecutors "don't dole" out sentences at all. Sentencing is one of the Judge's duties. The input prosecutors have in sentencing is less direct; aside from their actual performance in the trial, they also decide which and how many charges to file for indictment.
I don't know exactly how to prove/disprove this, or what data to look for, but it's at least a plausible narrative.
In fact, we might not even have (initially) overstaffed prosecutors offices; we might have had the right # to clean up the 80's, and simply maintained staffing levels when we should have reduced it. (Shrinking leviathon is hard.)
Though are you intending to suggest that crime wasn't as big a deal as it was perceived during our "decades-long national freakout"? I haven't investigated this and have no real opinion, I'm just curious.
To figure out what caused the jump in crime you gotta look at what was happening in the 1950's and 1960's. Lots of things were. E.g. most U.S. cities saw their population peak in 1950, and saw an exodus of middle class people in the 1950's and 1960's.
Much has been written on the subject, but I don't think the drug war is a cause so much as it is a symptom of what happened. There was so much else happening that better fits the timeline. Steve Pinker, for example, blames rock & roll and young people: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/h/humfig/11217607.0002.206/--deciv....
After WWII, white southerners moved north in search of jobs, and were not happy to find a sizeable population of black people who were not normalized to the invisible and constant discrimination against black people in the south.
In the 1950s, desegregation and school integration was the final straw in a long discomfort with the growing black population in urban Baltimore, and white people began moving to the suburbs, speeding up their flight even more through the 1960s.
At the same time, heroin use in the city rose dramatically through the 1960s. A new class of violent drug dealers began to control the sale of drugs in the city. Burglaries rose tenfold and robberies rose thirtyfold from 1950 to 1970.
By 1968, the city was seriously deteriorating, with increase in crime and drug abuse, increased racial tension, and a total lack of support for the education or employment of the city's increasingly disadvantaged black citizens. When it was announced that MLK was assassinated, riots enveloped the city. Politicians blamed the people and not the conditions, white voters agreed, and a white exodus to the suburbs ensued. Over a period of 40 years the population in the city decreased by 200,000.
Drug use increased, jobs decreased, and the local economy basically tanked. Throughout this time, prison gangs were beginning to spring up and infiltrate vulnerable populations such as these. Kids grew up in predominately black, poor neighborhoods with high unemployment and high crime, and were stymied by a lack of easy access to a good education.
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The drug war's primary negative effect on the population isn't that they're putting people in jail for drugs. It's that it effectively increased the price of drugs. This not only made competition more fierce, it developed a new class of criminal, and made it that much more necessary for addicts to commit crime in order to score drugs. Drug dealing was then able to supplant other low-income work (where it was available) as a more reliable source of income. Increased violence is a subsequent side-effect of all this, and thus the increase in incarceration.
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To understand how deeply drugs (and the war on them) intersects with violent crime, gangs, impoverished black communities and the prison system, I highly recommend reading The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood. It was written in 1997 but I can tell you it is still completely relevant today. The Wire (especially season 3) is basically a meditation on how the drug war has completely destroyed black communities like those in Baltimore, and how it perpetuates the cycle of an eventual life in and out of prison for many (if not most) of the city's black males.
You want to talk violent crime? There's fewer places in this country more violent than Baltimore. You can't talk about the prison system or violent crime in Baltimore without talking about the drug trade. As recently as 2013, over half of the 650 officers of the Baltimore City Detention Center were found to be smuggling contraband for the Black Guerrilla Family, a prison gang founded in 1966 in California. Reports from gang members show that even by 1996, they had essentially total control over the facility. They, along with the Crips, used the illegal drug trade in order to achieve power and influence enough to control officers working at the facility.
Finally, there's the more recent evidence that really puts things into perspective. In 2013, the city's chief of police noted how for "everyday people", crime had dropped, even though the murder rate was at an all-time high. What did he mean by that? Approximately 80 to 85 percent of the victims of violent crime were african-american males involved in the drug trade.
And homicide rates have skyrocketed every month since the most recent riots in Baltimore. The reason? So many pharmacies got robbed during the riots that it flooded the market with prescription drugs at prices up to ten times lower than they used to be, and rival gangs are fighting a war to dominate this new market while there's still excess supply.
Your point about WWI and WWII are interesting -- I'd come to a similar realization, partly jolted by the (entirely fictional, as far as I know -- more so than The Corner, and probably The Wire too) tv series "The Peaky Blinders"[2].
It does seem entirely reasonable that combining unemployment with a number of young men with great skills at war, coupled with severe PTSD and no treatment or well-fare to speak of is likely to lead to violent gangs forming. I can't imagine the situation is helped by ready access to firearms.
Baby Boomers.
More than anything, over the long term, the crime rate correlates with the proportion of the population that is males between, IIRC, the ages of about 15 and 25. The "crime wave" of the 1960s through 1980s was just the demographic bulge of the Post-WWII Baby Boom moving through that age bracket.
No, I'm saying that historically, variations in the proportion of the male population in the 15-25 age range produce variations in the crime rate that are bigger than the changes in those proportions (essentially, the concentration of people in that age range appears to affect the propensity to criminality; its not just that that age range is itself more prone to crime -- which it also is. One explanation is that the bigger that demographics influence is on the overall society, the more criminality is produced; fairly similar trends, at least as regards violence, are seen across societies, not just in the US.)
(And its not unique among generations in producting a crime spike like that; the Post WWI baby boom hitting that age range also corresponds to a peak crime period, though the peak was sharper and shorter, even compared to the shorter WWI baby boom period, than that of the Post WWII Baby Boom.)
"For all the talk about drug incarcerations driving up prison populations, drug offenders comprise only 17% of state prison populations and explain only about 20% of prison growth since 1980."
"Perhaps drug incarcerations are relatively short but ultimately trigger much longer sentences for future non-drug crimes via repeat offender laws. The available data make it clear that prior drug incarcerations do not seem to play any important role in future non-drug incarcerations."
They also acknowledge that prior contact with the legal system owing to minor drug offenses might increase the probability that police will choose to arrest someone for a non-drug crime, etc. but that such effects are invisible to their approach (i.e. they may exist, but they can't tell from the data they have).
It does not seem to me that the authors have an agenda to excuse the "war on drugs" so much as fully understand the contribution of drug enforcement to our huge prison population.
Bear in mind that the 17-20% of prisoners who are in for drugs on their own would constitute the entire prison population based on incarceration rates before 1980.
If it's not (just) low level drug crimes, what is it? Is it the prison as poorhouse / cash cow model which has been exposed in Ferguson Missouri (and is common across the country?)
If you saw someone who had been charged with kidnapping you would probably think oh they must have tied someone up and taken them someplace. Maybe even taken a kid?
I know someone that was charged with kidnapping when someone tried to leave the room with his phone. He would not let them leave with his phone. Arrested for kidnapping (yes the exact same charge someone who takes a kid from a playground gets) with a massive bail. Lost job etc.
From the paper:
The primary engine of prison growth, at least since crime began its decline in the early 1990s, has been an increased willingness on the part of district attorneys to file felony charges against arrestees
Prosecutors don't have to take much to trial any more, since instead of charging you with just the crime people recognize (say, bank robbery or drug dealing), they can add up a bunch of lower level 3-5 crimes and have you looking at 300 years in jail unless you take the plea bargain. 98% of federal prosecutions never go to trial - we used to laugh at the commies for that sort of thing.
As the article explains, the causation narrative is all wrong. The state prison population started ticking up in the 1970's, but drug prisoners started ticking up in the 1980's. From 1990 to 2010, the state prison population doubled, while the percentage of those who were drug offenders peaked in 1990 and declined thereafter.
The real explanation for skyrocketing prison populations is high crime combined with sentencing reforms (limiting judicial discretion) and parole reforms (prisoners in many states used to serve just 30-35% of their sentences before discretion was taken away from parole boards).
Interestingly, the U.S. has much higher prison populations than Europe, but would not be in the lead in terms of number of custodial sentences imposed: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/world/americas/23iht-23pri... ("Still, it is the length of sentences that truly distinguishes American prison policy. Indeed, the mere number of sentences imposed here would not place the United States at the top of the incarceration lists. If lists were compiled based on annual admissions to prison per capita, several European countries would outpace the United States. But American prison stays are much longer, so the total incarceration rate is higher.")
9 Technically speaking, the claim that “a large majority of those admitted to prison never serve time for a drug charge” means that for that majority of inmates the most serious charge was never a drug charge. Many inmates are convicted of multiple charges, and someone convicted of a violent or property offense along with a drug charge will be classified as a “violent” or “property” offender, not a “drug” offender.
Opponents of the War on Drugs believe that a significant portion of violent and property crimes are causally linked to strict enforcement of prohibition. Prohibition gives an implicit monopoly to criminal organizations, which causes violent crimes in the form of territorial disputes. This monopoly also increases the price of drugs for addicted users, which drives property crime, e.g. stripping copper to sell for scrap. An analysis that categorizes a heroin dealer that shoots a victim as a "Violent" offender but not a "Drug" offender seems flawed.
Violent offenders are younger on average where drug offenders come in a wider age range. So, on that basis alone you would expect violent offenders to be less likely to have a drug charge than the population as a whole.
This jives with David Simon's description of the prevailing attitude of enforcement in The Corner. The justice system is too overwhelmed to press charges for mere drug offenses, so you are less likely to end up with a conviction without a more serious crime attached.
> In reality, a majority of prison growth has come from locking up violent offenders
And also:
> a large majority of those admitted to prison never serve time for a drug charge
I think there is an important difference between someone who is violent against other people versus someone who uses drugs (and might be violent in a sense to him/herself but no one else). So where "reducing sanctions for drug offenders" might be a novel thing to do, "reducing punishment for violent or property offenders" might not be. Apart from which one is "less complicated" or more efficient to the goal of scaling back incarceration.
The Big 4 violent crimes are murder/manslaughter, rape, robbery and ag. assault. Of those 4, it's easy to get charged with the last two. For instance: I was "gently mugged" at night a few years back on my block; 3 teenagers jumped me and demanded my phone, which I gave them, and my bag, which I refused to give them, at which point they ran. They were charged with robbery (I didn't bother showing up to their trial, which I understands means they were acquitted, which seems like a decent outcome).
How was this ever so ambiguous that it took this long for somebody to figure out?
Another contributor is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States
There are relationships between incarceration, poverty, and class and race struggles.
(How about the fact that something like 40% of the prison population consists of blacks? Looks like the effect of "War on Black" more than "War on Drugs".)
The problem is mostly cultural, not legislative.
A number of people in the US have been arrested for assault for farting on a police officer. At least one was arrested for farting not on a police officer, but for fanning the fumes from his fart towards a police officer.
Drug inmates’ share of unique offenders is basically the same as their share of inmates: about 20%, or 26% if we count those convicted of both drug and non-drug offenses as “drug offenders,” compared to 17% of the total stock
When you look at state and local prison statistics, or at least the ones I've looked at during message board arguments, you quickly see that drug crimes do not dominate; in the midwest, the dominating crime appears to be domestic violence.
A common rebuttal to that point is that at any point in time, there may be more domestic violence inmates in prison, but the overall flow of drug offenders is greater: they serve shorter but more frequent sentences; the "installment plan", as the author puts it.
The statistics don't appear to bear that out. The tables that precede this point are interesting, too. To the extent that prison is a "revolving door" for inmates, that too does not appear to be the explaining factor for mass incarceration.
This will be a wonderful thing for 134k people who've harmed no one and have had their freedom stolen by an oppressive government.
But we shouldn't expect it to significantly reduce incarceration in the US. According to this article, the best way to do that would be to somehow convince Americans to beat, rape and murder people less.
Also, the paper focuses on policies and enforcement, but seems to mostly ignore the social effects of broken drug policies in creating criminals. How many people are robbing or burgling (accounting for over 20% of incarcerations again) in order to support drug habits? How much gang-related violent crime leading to incarceration is funded by drugs?
You can't just cherry pick the easy numbers and say "look, drug policies aren't that bad for incarceration!"
[1] http://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offens... [2] http://felonvoting.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=0...
Also, an important distinction between incarcerations and prisoners is explained on the fourth page of the article. Tl;dr; consider a 2 man prison, with 1 murderer in jail for 20 years and a rotating cast of heroin users serving 1 year sentences. Drug users represent 95% of incarcerations and 50% of prisoners.
Decades of stable incarceration ended suddenly in the mid-1970s, as the U.S. prison population soared from about 300,000 to 1.6 million inmates, and the incarceration rate from 100 per 100,000 to over 500 per 100,000. (...) [T]he United States is now the world’s largest jailer, both in absolute numbers and in rate
Table 1B: various offenses’ contribution to state prison growth, 1980–1990, 1990–2009
1980 1990 2009 % 1980-1990 %1990-2009
Total 294,000 681,400 1,362,000
Violent 173,300 316,600 724,300 36% 60%
Property 89,300 173,700 261,200 22% 13%
Drug 19,000 148,600 242,200 33% 14%
Other 12,400 45,500 134,500 9% 13%
When the crime drop begins, however — which is when one might expect drug offenses to become more important, since they are more discretionary — the importance of drug offenses declines precipitously, and the incarceration of violent offenders dominates.
In other words, whatever the historical importance of drug offenses to prison growth, the incarceration of drug offenders is not a central causal factor today.
And in the conclusion, also verbatim:
(...) [i]f legislators decide that reducing drug enforcement is still a net social good, regardless of its impact on prison populations, the tools at their disposal are limited.
Criminal justice enforcement in the United States is highly disaggregated across a wide range of institutions operating relatively independently of each other. At least right now, prison growth is driven by prosecutorial aggressiveness, and legislatures have little control over locally elected, locally funded prosecutorial offices.
Legislative success may require unconventional yet viable approaches, such as adopting charging or pleading guidelines or making efforts to push the cost of felony incarceration onto county budgets
Here's what's really fucked up about this paper: the title. That "the war on drugs" is not responsible for the rise in prison population.
But it's explicitly the policies, increased enforcement and increase in prosecutorial aggressiveness that is the direct result of the war on drugs that is increasing the incidence of violent crime, and hence, the prison population.
Illegal drugs are the reason people commit more violent crime, and the reason more people get locked up for it is due to the prison industrial complex as a new form of cotton field. There is an entire class of people in this country who are born and bred to go to prison, and it is due to illegal drugs. It's also due to a lack of jobs and education, but again, that's due to the government's war on anything drug-related.
I really hope i'm missing something about this paper. But it seems like a blatant white-washing of the government's role in the mass encarceration of and continued racial discrimination of the victims of the war on drugs.
....of the victims of the war on drugs. Specifically. Yes.
The paper is also at pains to point out that ending the drug war could have other benefits besides decreasing prison populations.
People aren't put into prison because people are put into prison, but that's close to the truth. If people had jobs and an education, they wouldn't need prison gangs and the drug trade to provide them an income. But an entire underclass of people in this country depend on the illegal drug trade to survive. It's the war on drugs that has made this possible. And he's shifting the focus/blame away from that.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the author is an economist.
I do find it extremely odd when a scholar uses an informal term like "Drug inmate" (for example, p. 180)
I found this listed under Education at http://www.fordham.edu/info/23171/john_pfaff : University of Chicago: BA, 1997; JD, 2003; PhD (Economics), 2005
Here are some Cliff's Notes:
First, the author: John Pfaff is an internationally recognized legal scholar specializing in the dynamics of mass incarceration. This paper isn't a drive-by by a random economist; he's cited widely on the subject, including in lots of very readable blogs. I lost an hour today reading things about his work. It's interesting.
Next, on the drug war: the author appears to be against the drug war and against mass incarceration. Some commenters are responding to this paper as if it was an appeal to continue the drug war. That's the wrong way to read it. The author sets out a simple problem statement: incarceration is increasing even as the crime rate falls. That can't be right! The point of the paper is simple: "end the drug war" is a bromide for mass incarceration. If we're really to make a dent in our prison population, more radical interventions are needed.
Third, and the reason I'm so irritated at HN's response: Pfaff agrees with HN about criminal justice in the US! The problem, as he sees it, is prosecutorial discretion. As crime has fallen, the likelihood than a US arrest will convert to a felony charge has drastically increased. That's so counterintuitive that the author is moved to hypothesize about why it's happening. Perhaps crime is falling, but neighborhoods are continuing to decline, and frustrated prosecutors are overcharging accused people as a sort of "quality of life" tactic. Or perhaps the incentives are all screwy: maybe we have too many prosecutors with too few budget constraints, and, as crime falls, they have to scrape the bottom of the criminal barrel to justify their paychecks.
This paper is fascinating, carefully laid out, and full of counterintuitive observations. Most of the places you'd look for simple answers to US prison population aren't actually in the evidence. You think it's revolving-door sentences, or "three strikes laws"? Nope! Most offenders aren't reincarcerated at all, and of those that are, there's a sharp drop-off after 2 prison stays. Think it's long sentences? Nope! Most offenders serve short sentences (the author notes the impact that nominal sentences have on prosecutor incentives, though). Think it's parole and drug-related parole violations? Nope, that's not in the evidence either; in fact, parole strictness doesn't seem to be a major driver at all.
Again: the point of this paper is not that prison is full of violent offenders and so mass incarceration isn't a problem. Even among the cohort of violent offenders, the author is concerned about prison population; as he points out, many violent offenders don't belong in prison either. The author is discomfited by the fact that prison population and the budget drain of our criminal justice process are increasing even as crime falls. Mass incarceration is a problem. If you're serious about wanting to end it, this paper is good news: it strongly suggests that letting college kids buy weed at Walgreens isn't nearly enough to allow us to write that problem off.
Laws get passed by support, support is gained by attention and focus. War on drugs is obvious in the population, the decriminalization of marijuana is obviously happening. The response that you've pointed out from the article here on HN supports the idea that many people have a strong belief that mandatory minimum sentences and a tough of drugs stance has helped to flood the prison systems.
Now you say the author appears to be against the drug war and against mass incarceration. During his research he sees that drug related incarcerations aren't nearly as large a problem as the increase in seeking felony charges. He writes this paper, says hey look at this other problem inside a problem!
But he doesn't make it clear, and I judge this from the comments here, that he thinks the initial problems exist. Thus positioning himself against them because the counter arguments will be made by the opponents of the end to the drug war, and the people who say mass incarceration isn't an issue will point to this paper and say: "See the drugs aren't the problem the violence is increasing, therefore we suggest that your honor not repeal prohibition"
You want the deck stacked in your favor, the mass opinion needs to be on your side, to suggest alternatives is to weaken the force trying to repeal prohibition. To weaken the arguments to the point where no decision can be made is still winning for the people wanting to keep the war on drugs going and the incarceration rate up. Indecision is loss, you'd want to have a unified voice to make the change happen.
That you've highlighted these points so much is commendable, but the author should have done that work for you from the outset. You are relying on people giving the cognitive effort required to come to their own conclusions. That is a mistake when you are dealing with more then on person, and we want everyone to agree to end the drug war right?
Thus the way to do that, even if the author sees this other problem in a problem, is to put his weight and effort into reinforcing the existing propositions. Then once those propositions are past, which is incredibly hard, highlight the other problem areas. Start from the outside in and from the positions with the most support. The war on drugs appears to be weakening, but it isn't done, and the mass opinion can't handle a distraction, which gives power to the incumbents.
So he is right, felony handouts are the bigger problem by percentage. Try and argue that assault with a deadly weapon charge should see a reduced sentence, or any other more grevious charge, and you'll be fighting the "think of the children crowd", the "why do you want the murderer of my child to go free parent". Right now the power is building to reduce the war on drugs, which would reduce incarcerations by a measurable amount. Put the focus there, then continue with a winning moment in the end of prohibition to say "look here there is another terrible atrocity, lets keep making America better!"
There is more than changing laws to being right, and I think that is why you're seeing the response you've highlighted in your multiple comments.
But yes, science is science because you don't have to accept the results of your research for them to be the truth. I'm actually suggesting adding in more personal opinion to help direct the research in the view of those folks whom will only read the synopsis.
There has been a trend in legislation. X is bad but is already illegal, and some people who do X use Y, so Y is made illegal too. Some gangsters use large sums of cash so let's ban large sums of cash. Some terrorists use strong encryption so let's ban strong encryption. Some spammers use whois privacy so let's ban whois privacy. Some drug dealers use scales so let's ban scales. Some bootleggers break DRM so let's ban breaking DRM.
This happens many times over until most of the people who are not gangsters or terrorists or spammers or drug dealers or bootleggers can nonetheless be charged because they harmlessly use cash or strong encryption or privacy services or digital scales or DeCSS. And charged with "money laundering" or "arms dealing" or other incredibly serious crimes.
Which may at least partially explain why so many people are locked up for "violent crime" -- it isn't that so many people (outside of gangs) are spilling blood, it's that we've allowed "violent crime" to encompass things like weapons possession that don't inherently involve violence or harm to anyone.
"Crime of violence" does not include the offense of unlawful possession of a firearm by a felon (US code).
Possessing a firearm while committing a robbery is a violent crime, whether you use it or not. But the robbery itself is also classified as a violent crime, with or without the gun.
That's at the federal level, which constitutes a smaller percentage of total inmates, more of which are in for non-violent drug offenses, than the states. And for example:
"Although the statutes allow for varying degrees and punishments, the crime [Criminal Possession of a Weapon] is generally considered a violent offense in New York with mandatory minimum terms of incarceration."
http://www.new-york-lawyers.org/weapon-crimes.html
But we don't need to get into the whole gun control debate, it's only one example. The problem of criminal laws expanding to encompass more than what a normal person would consider to be criminal behavior is prolific and by no means limited to nonviolent offenses. The instance elsewhere in the comments of someone being arrested for "kidnapping" for refusing to allow someone else to abscond with his phone, for example.
In other words, defining “drug offenders” solely as those convicted of drug crimes is not as objectively correct as it might initially seem. Although certainly a valid and useful definition, there are other ways to think about what counts as the product of drug enforcement that may alter estimates of the impact of the War on Drugs. Furthermore, this section should establish that scaling back the War on Drugs can have collateral effects — such as changing how society manages addiction or how enforcement interacts with drug-market violence — that are not immediately apparent when simply look- ing at arrest or incarceration rates.
I suspect though that had it been one of the questions it _would_ have shown a bigger link between the war on drugs and incarceration, and thus not been sufficiently interesting to be worthy of publication. Academic click-bait!
The conclusion I inferred was that prosecutors are running amok across the whole gamut of possible crimes.
If you have read the paper, can you give a serious coherent series of arguments about how its analysis is broken? Every third page is a simple presentation of statistics and then an analysis of those stats. Which of them are wrong?
I'm sorry to ask the question, since "did you actually read" is borderline uncivil, but when someone quotes something and your reaction is "aha!", the clear suggestion is that you yourself hadn't read far enough to see that quote yourself.
It's fine not to read the paper, but it's less fine to suggest that a tiny quote could invalidate an entire paper that you haven't read.
1) the hypotheses examined were very narrowly framed
2) Footnotes 9 and 13 admit that drug-related offenders may in fact be present in the statistics as 'violent crime', yet the paper does not consider this further.
After that I skim-read to ensure there flaws weren't addressed. If I missed the place where these flaws are addressed, I would appreciate your pointing it out.
I am glad you read the whole paper, but I would caution you against believing you got any closer to the whole truth by doing so.
Let's see a measurement of the total eco-system (cultural, economic, etc) destruction that the war on drugs has caused to, eg the black community since 1965.
Let's see a proper measurement of all the fallout and spin-off effects, ranging from from repeat offenders, to fatherless households, to education effects, to tens of thousands that have been killed as a direct consequence.
Let's measure the land value collapse that went with the war on drugs, which practically robbed an entire race of people of a prime source of savings and wealth. To have those potential assets be replaced by completely run down housing.
Then let's see how the failed policies on drugs, having decimated the black community in just 20 years, then led to fears about skyrocketing crime rates and violence that directly came out of that 'drug war' - including the implementation of mandatory minimum sentencing, which was a reaction by the white community, by politicians looking to placate their voters, to the crime that was caused by the war on drugs.
This article tries to pretend the war on drugs occurred in a semi-vacuum, when its effects were extraordinarily wide spread, touching every possible aspect of society. It is precisely the root cause of the extreme rise in the prison population, all the other causes extended from it.
There's quite a lot of violent crime that's directly related to and driven by the illegal drug trade.
Of course this is already a well understood effect. Which makes the article's intentional evasion of it that much more blatant. Whether we were to discuss the effects of organized crime around alcohol prohibition, or the Mexican cartels. One need look no further than what the war on drugs has done to hundreds of Mexican towns and cities, to understand what it has done to the black communities in the US in the last ~50 years.
It also attracts the kind of person who isn't interested in drugs and wouldn't be put off by a testing policy for substances they have no desire to try. Then, surprise surprise, they get all judgy that other people in the population they're supposed to be soberly serving want to snort a little coke now and then.
Yeah, but 17% is still a large percentage. A 17% reduction would make a difference.
Maybe if one or one's family hasn't been directly harmed by the drug war? I don't think such an abstract idea could possibly be the primary opposition to any policy. These state policies have physically destroyed communities and lives. People want their families, and they want to stop being oppressed by the police. They want the baton and tear gas out of their face. That's the primary opposition.
Abstract principles are always secondary to material reality.
It's just like the naive idea that the "non-aggression principle" determines how people should interact with each other. Suddenly every use of force that the speaker feels is justified is 'retaliatory' and every use of force they feel is unjustified is 'initiatory'.
The only coherence principles like this have are what people already commonly agree on. You don't need to base your politics on principles for that. They do not tell you how to harmonize ideological conflicts or develop and spread ideas that lack consensus.
Then why have a big, green statue on an island off the shore of New Jersey? What does that stand for?
"A disordered country is full of loyal patriots."
Lots of your anti-prohibition activists are wealthy progressives and libertarians who, like me, like David Simon, have no personal stake in the outcome.
A change in policies towards illegal drugs would have a wide ranging impact.
Marijuana is going to be legal in the US. It's not a live issue. We don't have to import it into every other social science inquiry.
Great, that means if we end the drug war, we'd get 20% reduction in our world-record incarcerated population. A half-million more people (roughly) will be freed to get treatment and attempt to contribute to the economy and society.
That sounds like a great start to me.
I would personally want to do more research on this person and his writings before taking his entire argument at face value.
Between selecting your data sources, methodology, hypothesis, outlier treatment, and even the choice of publishing or not your findings there is so much room for bias that the author identity can not be ignored.
Now, if other people go do different research on the same hypothesis, and still get the same result, and those people do publish everything they have, then you'll have an objective body of work you can just inspect and trust that it's real.
For instance, I grant that a "violent offender" who is in jail on a principal charge of shooting a police officer while in the process of being arrested on a drug charge or during a drug raid was indeed violent, and is rightly viewed differently than a "non-violent drug offender".
But we still have to acknowledge that if there were no War On Drugs, then there wouldn't be as many of those drug raids and drug arrests to begin with. The circumstances for many of those violent crimes simply would not occur.
So, the process by which you sort the offenders into batches seems to have a strong impact on the conclusions you make.
You can very easily do more research on his writing on mass incarceration, since he appears to be internationally famous for it, is cited widely, and writes on the Internet about it.
Worth the reminder: I find no evidence that the author thinks that the drug was is a good thing, and lots of evidence that he sees mass incarceration as a problem.
In fact, if you want to do more research on the paper, you could start by reading it: the author doesn't even think most violent offenders should be incarcerated.
This is an interesting read on the whole situation. Curious to see where it leads. And hopeful that more research will make it into decisions. Seems too much of that space (legislation) is fueled by dogma and priviledged ignorance.
... corresponding to logical pages 201 and 202.
According to Wikipedia, the definition of Aggravated Assault in the US is:
-an attempt to cause or purposely, knowingly, or recklessly causing bodily injury to another negligently causing bodily injury to another with a dangerous weapon.[20]
-causing bodily harm by reckless operation of a motor vehicle (vehicular assault).[21]
-threatening another in a menacing manner.[22]
-knowingly causing physical contact with another person knowing the other person will regard the contact as offensive or provocative[23]
-causing stupor, unconsciousness or physical injury by intentionally administering a drug or controlled substance without consent[24]
-purposely or knowingly causing reasonable apprehension of bodily injury in another[25]
-any act which is intended to place another in fear of immediate physical contact which will be painful, injurious, insulting, or offensive, coupled with the apparent ability to execute the act.[26]
If you want to investigate the difference, I suspect you should start there, since that seems to make up the bulk of our incarcerated.
I'm talking about the contribution of ghetto culture. You're a kid. Your dad spends time in prison for drug possession. That impacts your life. That is fallout from the war on drugs.
You'll have a very hard time finding anyone on HN to take the other side of an argument about ending the drug war. Everyone here agrees with you. The author of the paper agrees with you. Drug prohibition is not a live issue on HN in general.
The author agrees with you that further study is merited.
The drug war was just a subset of a systematic antagonism by the state against certain population segments. The same communities that were ravaged by crime and police alike were pushed into calamity by social policies that lifted up ahem privileged segments of the population while leaving others in the dust with inadequate social and economic resources.
The only connection between conviction rates and the drug war the author considers are drug related convictions. That is, frankly, stupid. It is the increased presence of police brought about by the drug war by increased funding, bloating of federal agencies, and escalated enforcement practices that links the policy to the effect. If a cop is in the neighborhood because of the drug war and decides to rough someone up and arrest them for 'quality of life' offenses or 'resisting arrest', that is an effect of policy, of which the drug war is a major component.
Normally I wouldn't feel so skeptical of an expert's findings on a highly complicated subject, but there's also the fact that this publication claims it is nonintuitive and runs counter to the conventional thoughts of his peers. I think the lines of reasoning I tried to point out are well demonstrated in the first source he cites, Michelle Alexander's fantastic book. I think the author can only achieve the results he can by drawing a small box around some policies and calling that the drug war when what other people call the drug war is far larger than that.
P.S. Another comment mentioned gang violence, which is strongly linked to inadequate social and economic resources and a large illegal drug trade.
P.P.S. When the police and prosecution get to decide who is a violent offender, you can't use measurements of who is a violent offender in order to establish whether or not police policy is effective and just. Furthermore, why do people become violent offenders? The higher order effects of a policy that treats communities as disposable, unwanted, and antagonistic certainly feed into this.
None of that happens in a vacuum. If you lock up a parent for drugs, and his son is raised in a broken household, in a broken neighborhood overflowing with the effects of failed war on drugs policies, what's the likely outcome to that situation? You don't have to take my word for it, read any interview with any black person that has ever made it out of that situation. Read about what their lives were like, what the culture was like, what their households were like.
That's why this article's premise is so obviously far off. The war on drugs touches everything.
If you believe what you appear to believe about the injustice of mass incarceration and its racial disparities, as I do, you should be celebrating this article, not excoriating it.