Focusing on drug markets rather than users means less crime (2012)

Once past the confusing label of DMI (Drug Market Intervention -- isn't throwing people in prison a type of intervention, too?), this seems to be about one main concept:

Approach drug dealers with alternatives for their lives, intervention that can actually work, rather than prison. In other words, an alternative, parallel criminal justice system that doesn't rely on incarceration or criminal records.

The rest is just adjustments to police response in the area.

The catch is it requires support from the community. You need the people it lists[1] (i.e. enough of the community) behind the effort. Otherwise there's nobody to show up to the intervention meetings, and nobody to call police for aggressive intervention. And even if the community is behind it, the police and prosecutors have to be willing to agree to such deals, and set up such meetings.

This kind of non-criminal intervention not only has a good chance (much better chance than prison does) of changing dealers' minds about drug dealing, but their change in attitudes can also help change the minds of other drug dealers they're associated with. It also doesn't upend their lives with felony convictions.

It's worth noting also that this works because drug dealing socially isolates drug dealers from people who otherwise could help them. People involved with drugs won't always admit to it, even to close friends and relatives; and friends and relatives may not want to know or be involved, because that might put them at risk of being charged with drug crimes. Decriminalizing drugs would have much the same effect of removing barriers between drug dealers and their relatives and communities. The one thing this intervention approach misses, compared to decriminalization, is that while drugs remain illegal, the pathologies of black markets, created by criminalization, remain.

Who still thinks that our prison system works, on average, to rehabilitate? Those criminals who are rehabilitated do so in spite of the prison system and criminal justice system, not because of it. There's just overall not enough will or resources to go with a more productive intervention/psychological/sociological approach to most crimes.

[1] > "[When three drug dealers accepted the offer] they met not only police and prosecutors, but also family members, people from their communities, pastors from local churches and representatives from social-service agencies. Their neighbours and relatives told them that dealing drugs was hurting their families and communities."

Criminalizing less victimless activity means less crime.