>I would like to see the stats with people who are in prison for low level drug offenses taken out.

Lucky for you, criminologists have crunched the numbers over and over again. Only 20% of prisoners are incarcerated for drug offenses—not just “low-level” ones. Furthermore, many of them are violent offenders who pleaded down to lesser offenses as part of a plea bargain.

In other words, the United States could release every single drug offender from prison and still have the highest incarceration rate in the world. Mass incarceration is overwhelmingly driven by violent offenders. America is simply a much more violent country than any European one.