Hacker News Reader

Comment by jakeogh | Hacker News Reader

End the 'war on' drugs. Completely. Either we own ourselves or we don't.

End private prisons that can incentivize arrest and imprisonment for minor offenders. No cite but commonly acknowledged that creating private prisons also creates a demand for prisoners.

The US puts a larger percentage of its population behind bars than any other country.

> No cite but commonly acknowledged that creating private prisons also creates a demand for prisoners.

Commonly acknowledged, but wrongly. Look at the inflection points in the U.S. incarceration rate: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/U.S._inc...

Growth started in 1972-73. The growth rate kneed around 2000. Compare with the prison prison population: http://static.prisonpolicy.org/prisonindex/graphs/privatepri.... They were pretty much insignificant until the 1990's. By then, the growth trend in incarceration rates was firmly established, and indeed, was closer to the knee in 2000 than to the initial upswing in the 1970's.

What happened in the 1980's and 1990's? Privatization of many other government services: http://www.kevingunn.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/TotalFed....

The most reasonable conclusion from the data is that private prisons are not creating the demand for prisoners, but rather reacting to the demand for privatizing government services generally. I fully agree that private prisons should be illegal, but they didn't create the problem.

We created the problem, with three strikes laws and cracking down on probation. E.g. http://www.dc.state.fl.us/secretary/press/2001/timeserved.ht.... In 1991, Florida prisoners served about 35% of their sentences. Due to a state law, by 2001 it was 83%.

The percentage of individuals incarcerated in private prisons is still a small (but growing) minority (maybe 10% or so, but much higher for juveniles). I think you have cause and effect reversed. The war on drugs created the demand for more prison space, which gave rise to the private prison industry. The related scandals and corruption (judges being paid for sentences, etc.) all stem from that.

26% of women in prison are there for drug crimes. 66% are there for violent and property crimes. So you still have the problem of what to do with their kids.

Thanks. 28% is a good start, I don't see how to improve the rest other than the suggestions in the article.

It's a magnificent start. Hard to correlate are what percentage of the 72% are drug-related - in pursuit of drugs, etc.

In America nearly 50% of the federal prison population are in for drug offenses according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons data current as of may 30th, 2015[0].

[0]http://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offens...

edit: As pointed out below it was the federal prison pop. Also, made it more obvious that I didn't mean 50% of America's total population.

That's 50% of the prison population, to be clear.

No, that's 50% of the federal prison population (notice how the totals add up). Most incarcerated Americans are in state prisons, and drug crimes are a much smaller fraction of most state prison inmate populations.

Directly drug-related (possession or trafficking) yes... but how many property and violent crimes have their root cause being drug-related? I would guess many.

And how many violent criminals are in prison on drug charges because they're easier to prove?

I think people too readily accept the narrative that crime in the U.S. can be traced back to the drug war.

Here is drug war spending: http://cdn.thewire.com/media/old_wire/img/upload/2012/10/12/...

Here is violent crime rate: http://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/wp-content/uploads/...

Violent crime started trending up in 1963, about 8 years before Nixon declared the war on drugs. By the time the drug war really got going in 1982-86, violent crime rates had already tripled.

It was lead in paint and gas that caused a rise in violent crime. It wasn't prisons that stopped that.

The Drug War and school-to-prison pipleline are real, too. We farm black people to keep no-neck white men in "good jobs at good wages." If anything, the Drug War is preventing a further drop in crime as lead gets flushed out of the environment.

Everybody has their theory of why crime increased in the 70's and started coming down after the 90's. People tend to adopt the theory that fits their worldview. I'm partial to the lead theory myself because I'm a rabid environmentalists. Urbanists blame suburbanization and white flight. Civil libertarians blame the drug war.

There is no conclusive proof or even extensive evidence in favor of any of those theories. But I think the drug war theory is one of the less compelling explanations given the evidence we have.

There have been meta-analyses of lead http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jan/07/violent...

They are pretty compelling. Lead wasn't just about crime. Tetraethyl lead was almost a global disaster that might have cost humanity dearly in some very general ways. The hypothesis is very strong, too. Refinery workers went violently insane. There was no question what the effect would be if there was enough cause to cause it.

Seems like everyone can be right about this. Lead. Intoxicated dissipation, a stagnant pool that has bred crime for millenia. Poverty. White flight. Restrictions on family planning. And all these things feed on each other.

Stop and ask yourself: is there anyone who regularly writes on HN who thinks the drug war is a good thing? If you took a poll of HN commenters, full legalization would come out, where, 98%?

Clearly, when we discuss prison and the drug war, we're all talking about something more subtle than whether we should imprison people for doing drugs.

It's more important to find agreement on what it isn't: It isn't the black race, and the cure isn't harsh discipline and criminalization of behavior in schools, and stop-and-frisk laws that target mostly black people.

Unfortunately, while the libertarians might make HN look wise about the Drug War, there are way too many people, even on HN, who are happy with, and who have various justifications for, prisons filled with black and latino prisoners.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com