These two paragraphs lead me to believe that if the author had considered the rise of mandatory minimum sentences part of the war on drugs the headline of the paper might be different.
"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."
Actually I think the article does address these points:
"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?)
The first paragraph you quote was cut short in your summary. The rest of it is:
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.
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.
For much of the 1980s, Michigan imposed a mandatory life sentence for possession of large amounts of hard drugs. Which isn't contrary to your point that the drug laws should be considered separately, but if the drug sentencing is independently harsh, it doesn't need the three strikes accelerator.
A famous comedian made a deal to avoid that sentence. One that promotes a family values image.
The prison population isn't a function of a bump in crime. The prison population shot up as the crime rate fell through the 90s. The paper concludes by asking a series of questions about why prosecutors got harsher even as the crime rate dropped.
At least one plausible explanation for this is that crime went down because the criminals were put in jail and this ended their criminal careers (either because they stayed in jail, or because jail scared them away from crime). Prosecutors and police saw this was successful and continued it, possibly (likely) past the point of optimality.
I don't know exactly how to prove/disprove this, or what data to look for, but it's at least a plausible narrative.
It also seems plausible to me that during a decades-long national freakout about crime, we overstaffed prosecutors offices, which then proceeded to find more work for themselves.
That is plausible. These two narratives are not even inconsistent with each other.
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.
Crime is definitely less of a big deal now than it was during the freakout. The money question is, were deliberate criminal justice intervention the reason why crime dropped, or were extrinsic factors (like lead toxicity or family planning services or improved education)? If it's the latter, we need to reevaluate the resources we allocate to the criminal justice system. Maybe: fewer prosecutors, more judges.
Well that's a nonsensical question to pose. First of all, harsh is subjective. Prosecutors don't dole out "harsh" sentences, they dole out longer or more restrictive sentences. To them, the sentence is not harsh because they're keeping innocent civilians safer by keeping criminals behind bars longer, or by making it easier to send potentially harmful people back to prison. Prison is no longer seen as a way to be penitent about one's actions: prison is now seen as a way to keep the bad away from the good.
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.
Huh? Harsh is not only objective but trivially easy to measure. As crime rates fell, the likelihood than an arrest would convert to a felony conviction rose. That's the opposite of the causality you'd want or expect: as the community gets safer, the criminal justice system should become less intrusive, not more.
Wouldn't a less intrusive justice system only involve itself where guilt is more severe and more certain, and thus see a higher rate of felony conviction per arrest (with a much lower arrest rate)?
There's an alternate explanation for that: that the harsher sentences made that population unable to commit further crimes by leaving them in prison. This could also be correlated with the rise in prison violence.
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.
That would seem to make sense if the three strikes laws are as significant a factor in causing the increase in felony convictions as I've been lead to believe.
>Prosecutors don't dole out "harsh" sentences, they dole out longer or more restrictive sentences.
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.
The problem it that theory is that the timing doesn't work out. Nixon first allocated money for the drug war in 1971 (as well as coining the term). The rise in crime started about a decade before that, and homicide rates had already doubled by 1970.
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.
Well sure, from a period starting just after WWII and culminating with the MLK riots, the whole country had been set up to both create and disenfranchise a new class of people: those connected to both the trade of illegal drugs and organized crime in general. Before, organized crime didn't necessarily involve the drug trade, but since then it has been synonymous. Drugs are the economic engine that powers the size and scope of the American prison population, and shapes the culture of people who are born to go to prison.
I don't think the timeline of that narrative makes sense. There were two major sets of milestones in the drug war: most drugs were heavily regulated or made illegal in the 1920's and 1930's. And modern drug law and the drug war was put into place in the 1970's. But crime started going up in 1960, decades after drugs were made illegal and a decade before the drug war. So how does "drugs" explain the rise in crime rates at that time?
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....
The timeline is a well-understood series of events that developed pockets of economic depression, lack of education and above-average crime rates. Take Baltimore for example. Okay, it's probably far too extreme to be an average case, but it's the one I know the best.
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.
---
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.
---
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.
Without (hopefully) detracting from your excellent points, a couple of points on tv series: 1) The Corner is also worked into a tv mini series[1] by the author -- and in case people are not aware - he also wrote "The Wire" -- which is a more dramatic treatment of the same material.
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.
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.
If you plot the homicide rate among people aged 18-24 you see that it spikes up to twice the normal level from the late '80s through the mid '90s. It nearly triples for teenagers over that time period.
So, you're saying that baby boomers caused a disproportionate increase in the rate of crime that no other generation before or since has caused, for no reason at all.
> So, you're saying that baby boomers caused a disproportionate increase in the rate of crime that no other generation before or since has caused, for no reason at all.
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.)
Actually, the theory that lead pipes were a measure instigator of the fall of Rome is generally considered discredited by most historians. The Romans were even aware of lead poisoning (cf., Vitruvius who specifically mentioned lead pipes as "unwholesome").
Overzealous charging and prosecution are also a major part of the equation. They charge seriously felonies now days in what should be minor misdemeanor cases.
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.
I had that reaction too. The author claims that the role of long sentences is overblown, since most offenders serve relatively short sentences (and don't subsequently reoffend). But the availability of long sentences to prosecutors might convert a lot of cases that wouldn't involve custodial time into felonies.
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
Part of the reason for that is legislatures have given them more options in that department. The money crimes that were created to give cops an oblique way to go after drug dealers apply to pretty much any crime, i.e. if you rob a bank it's likely they'll be able to charge with with money laundering, structuring, currency smuggling, wire fraud, or any of a dozen of those types of crime. Plus, conspiracy goes with just about everything.
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.
It's useful to juxtapose Figure 1 on 174 with Figure 2 on 181.
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.")
It looks like the author does not believe sentences are directly responsible for the prison population, as most are short and most offenders are not re-incarcerated.
Interesting. Will have to read the rest of the paper. It'd be pretty bleak if you couldn't blame the government one way or the other for the level of incarceration.
Footnote 9 seems like a glaring issue with this analysis:
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.
The criminals have lots of violent disputes, not just over territory, and the users commit more than just property crime, e.g. robbery. People up and down the supply chain try to rip each other off. It seems that the author did not expend much imagination in looking for prohibition-driven crime.
Unless you think a violent drug dealer is less likely than a nonviolent offender to ever have been charged with a drug offense, the data doesn't bear this out. According to the author's data, it seems that most violent offenders have never been sentenced for a drug charge.
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.
If a violent offender that was also charged with a drug offense is classified in the "Violent" category, how can you draw any conclusions about how likely they are to have ever been charged with a drug offense? The data seem to only show that you are unlikely to end up in prison with a drug offense as your most serious crime.
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.
This is discussed towards the end of Section 2, where he attempts to establish that the set of inmates charged with violent offenses is mostly disjoint with the set of inmates charged with drug offenses.
Thanks for the pointer. Are you referring to Sections II C&D? Tables 4A and 4B seem like they would have the same categorization issue I described above. As I read it, the "Never drugs" column refers to a given offender never having a drug offense as the most serious offense for a conviction. This doesn't mean that the offender was never charged with a drug offense.
tl;dr:
"Taken together, these findings suggest that the effects of the War on Drugs are often relatively slight compared to other causes, and that they are certainly not as big as many often assert. In reality, a majority of prison growth has come from locking up violent offenders, and a large majority of those admitted to prison never serve time for a drug charge, at least not as their “primary” charge. These results pose a challenge to those who wish to aggressively scale back incarceration, since the current politics of reducing sanctions for drug offenders is less complicated than that for reducing punishment for violent or property offenders. Reforming drug statutes is easier, but doing so will likely not effect significant change in the overall incarceration rate." p.6
"These results pose a challenge to those who wish to aggressively scale back incarceration, since the current politics of reducing sanctions for drug offenders is less complicated than that for reducing punishment for violent or property offenders."
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.
Could you quote this in the text (just enough so I can \C-s to the right place)? I'm having a hard time finding this point in the rather large document.
"Not all violent offenders are murderers and serious assaulters, and many
would likely be better served by not being incarcerated, but the optics and
political risks of violent-offender decarceration are much tougher to navigate
than those for drug offenses."
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).
Just to clarify, by "jump" do you mean "surprised", "hit", or "beat the s* out of"? I wasn't familiar with a usage of "jumped" that didn't include at least being hit (if not beat up), and Urban dictionary seems to agree with that interpretation: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=jumped
> In reality, a majority of prison growth has come from locking up violent offenders, and a large majority of those admitted to prison never serve time for a drug charge, at least not as their “primary” charge.
How was this ever so ambiguous that it took this long for somebody to figure out?
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.
Not only does it not ignore that question, it addresses it empirically. You should read past the 14th footnote, where you say you stopped; this is addressed towards the end of section 2, about halfway through.
No, all of those things are true, they just don't have overwhelmingly large effect sizes. They are, undoubtedly, still driving up the incarceration rate.
Part of the problem is probably that in the USA you can be locked up for sneezing. It's common for normal people to have been jailed for something at some point in their lives, who would never have had any brush with the law in another developed country.
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".)
You can get locked up for lots of irrelevant things in every developed country. Except in most countries that is seen as a last resort, so cops aren't particularly inclined to arrest people if there is another way, and judges aren't particularly inclined to jail people.
> Unless your claim is that sneezing is classified as a "violent crime", the paper appears to refute this point.
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.
Three quarters of US murder victims are male, and more than half are black. The same goes for US murderers, to which we can add that more than half are under 30, and more than half use handguns (not an inexpensive tool). I suspect that the circumstances more often involve drug gangs than domestic violence. It seems unlikely to me that Drug Prohibition could be such a big factor in murder but not in other crime or incarceration.
Also, let me emphasize that this does NOT suggest that we shouldn't end the war on drugs. Circa 2009, there were 134k people in state prison for drug crimes. We should let them out immediately.
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.
That's not what the article says. It is in fact at pains to point out that violent offenders are not necessarily rapists and murderers, and concludes by discussing --- at length --- the empirically observable increase in prosecutorial aggression, which it terms "ill-advised", and the data we'd need to start ascertaining the reasons why prosecutors are charging more people with felonies even as crime drops.
I look at it from the following perspective. There are two intertwined economies. The formal economy and the underground economy. Because of the war on drugs, the underground economy is booming. It's counter-intuitive because you'd expect it to shrink because of the war on drugs. Except the war on drugs moved drug trade from the formal economy to the underground economy. Add to that the fact that when drugs became illegal it made them more scarce and as a result more expensive. Most (if not all) incarcerated people took part in this underground economy, willingly or unwillingly, by faith or by choice. Human trafficking, prostitution, drug abuse, and violence are all part of the underground economy and they are increasing because this economy is growing, enabled by the war on drugs.
Where is the 17% number coming from? A quick search turns up the official stats from the Federal Bureau of Prisons showing 48% of Federal incarcerations are due to drugs[1]. And using slightly older data, but still more recent than the author's 2010 numbers, it looks like over 20% of incarcerations at a combined State and Federal level are for drugs[2].
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!"
If you read the words surrounding the number, you might observe that "drug offenders comprise only 17% of state prison populations ". Thus, observing that 48% of incarcerations at the federal level are due to drugs is, well, a different matter entirely.
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.
Agreed, but data point two in my first statement is for prisoners as well, not incarcerations. Ignoring Federal prisoners entirely is disingenuous since the total percentage across all prisons for drug offenders is above 20%. That's a lot more than 17%, and it's rising.
Federal incarcerations are slanted largely because of their limited criminal jurisdiction. 90% of prisoners are ultimately state prisoners. This from the paper's argument.
It's more like 13% of prisoners are in Federal jail as of 2012. That's a big chunk to ignore given how many Federal prisoners are in prison due to drugs.
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
Drug offenses are still not the dominant contributor to prison growth, even during the first stage of rising incarceration, but their role in the 1980s is on a par with the locking up of violent offenders.
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
The other two columns are percentages, so the interval size doesn't matter. In addition, 1990 is an important point because of the notable shift in overall crime rates that occurred there (crime went up until 1991, then declined dramatically and continued falling as the prison population increased).
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.
Did you actually read the paper? It's hard to imagine how anyone who did could come away with the conclusion that it's white-washing mass incarceration.
Could you be more specific about this claim so I can be sure that we're talking about the same paper? Because in the paper I'm reading, the author returns again and again to the need for radical legislative solutions to the problem of mass incarceration, and specifically to the need for oversight over prosecutors, who are charging more people even as the crime rate falls.
The paper is also at pains to point out that ending the drug war could have other benefits besides decreasing prison populations.
Basically, the guy is stating that because the offenses people are being put into prison for are not drug-related offenses, it's not because of the war on drugs. Which is equivalent to saying that a football player doesn't have long-term memory loss because he played football, it's because he hurt his head multiple times.
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.
At the very least, this is post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc logic: it could be that people commit violent crimes because they're involved in the drug trade, or it could be that people who would ordinarily live a life of violent crime are disinclined to honor drug prohibition, alone among all the other laws they ignore.
The HN reaction to this paper is disappointing, most notably because so few of the people with strident opinions (against or for its conclusions) appear to have read it. I feel qualified to judge the prevailing sentiment on HN about criminal justice, and based on that: I feel like HN should be all over this paper; it should confirm all their biases except for one.
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.
What a great comment. People who don't understand this fact will be surprised when decriminalizing drugs won't halve the prison population. The author'd like to fix the problem of mass incarceration, and correctly points out that focusing on only one of the causes won't fix it.
Thanks for the excellent tl;dr of the paper. I'm surprised to see that sentencing plays such a small factor. I'm definitely going to have to reexamine some of my conclusions about what causes the U.S. prison population.
Since most criminal defendants are in fact guilty, perhaps the logic here could be something like: "prosecutors have made the system of adjudicating crimes so efficient using plea bargaining rules that sentences need to be ratcheted down sharply, both to account for the increased likelihood that the accused will go to prison and as a check on prosecutorial power".
There is also a question of whether the crimes defendants are in fact guilty of should even be on the books.
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.
I do not believe unlawful possession of a firearm is classified as a "violent crime"; for instance:
"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.
> "Crime of violence" does not include the offense of unlawful possession of a firearm by a felon (US code).
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."
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.
Is there an argument to be made that it doesn't matter whether or not he is right in the case that you want to reduce incarcerations and that this is muddying the water?
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.
The author is a social scientist writing for the academic literature, so the idea that he might amend or abridge his results to avoid "muddying the waters" of a policy debate seems extraordinarily dubious to me.
I can accept that, but I think that the opposition to the legalization of drugs will use this as a talking point to keep the laws as they are. And considering that, I think there could be some more clarification.
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.
This seems to ignore the question of whether the 'war on drugs' contributes to violent crime, and what fraction of criminals classified as violent should therefore be included in the 'war on drugs'.
It's not ignored; the paper discusses the "collateral effects" of the WOD, in contrast with the strict definition of a "drug offender". P 220:
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.
Thanks for pulling out that quote. To me, this section invalidates the whole paper: I think this paper would have been much more valuable had this been one of the 5 questions/mechanisms examined.
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!
Wait, did you read the paper, or did you read the abstract, wait for someone to quote something from the paper, and then use that quote as an argument against the whole paper?
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.
Of course I didn't read the whole paper! I stopped reading the paper when I recognized the fundamental flaws:
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.
The main problem with the paper is that it keeps discussing from the "War on Drugs" angle, even though it acknowledges early (from its very title onward) that this is not the main contributor to the huge prison population. It's hard to find an answer to the question which immediately follows, "OK, what is the cause, then?" And then it turns out that through indirect effects, in fact WOD might be a primary driver all the same. Confusing.
Can you be more specific about which of the author's conclusions point to drug prohibition being the primary cause of incarceration, just indirectly? That's not the conclusion I got at all.
The conclusion I inferred was that prosecutors are running amok across the whole gamut of possible crimes.
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.
Makes sense. To stick with the false premise core to the article, one would have to avoid much discussion of the organized crime aspects of the truly massive black market that the war on drugs created. How that organized crime affects communities through non-stop fear and intimidation, how it sucks in desperate people, how it perpetuates an endless cycle of crime and poverty that is centered around the profit system of 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.
If you engage in a trade that carries 10+ year sentences if you get caught and you suspect someone you know is going to snitch, you might think twice about letting them live. This applies to all vice crimes, not just drugs.
Not to mention that generations of cops are selected from folks who think alcohol is the only legit psychoactive substance. If more cops had experience with mind-expanding drugs, they'd be better at their jobs (both from having a broader perspective, but also from better understanding what it might be like to be on the other end of an encounter with the state, especially for neurodiverse people.)
It's like how GEICO got its start by only selling insurance to government employees (that's the GE) because they tended to be more cautious drivers. Government simply attracts that kind of person. And as private citizens, we should want our public servants to have their act together, presumably more so than the general populace.
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.
This is the wrong way to read the paper. The author isn't making a case against decriminalizing drugs. He's saying that even if you decriminalize drugs, you will still need other stronger interventions to work against mass incarceration and, for that matter, the racial disparities in incarceration.
The specific argument is made that if you decriminalize marijuana, it won't make a difference because there aren't that many incarcerations for marijuana specifically.
Even putting aside the penal effects, the primary opposition to the War on Drugs has always been about personal freedom and the right to determine one's own destiny. All else is secondary.
> the primary opposition to the War on Drugs has always been about personal freedom and the right to determine one's own destiny
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.
"Always"? Pretty sweeping, categorical assertion.
Voters' politics is based on interest, identity, and values. The latter two often run counter to the first (e.g. poor whites in the Republican Party, blacks in the Democratic Party). Blacks suffer disproportionately from Drug Prohibition, but many are religious and culturally conservative, and would like to see the death penalty for drug dealers (assuming the police could be trusted). They blame the drugs, not Drug Prohibition.
Lots of your anti-prohibition activists are wealthy progressives and libertarians who, like me, like David Simon, have no personal stake in the outcome.
Sorry, that "always" should have been accompanied with an "ought". Adhering to principle in spite of material conditions and consequences is, and I know I haven't supported this thesis, "bad".
Propaganda. The big green statue that was supposed to welcome people to its shores has not lifted its finger to protect the millions of people whose personhood is being deemed 'illegal'. It stands for an "idea", an idea defends no one and can be claimed by anyone. The idea that statue stands for is claimed by all sides of all mainstream politics in this country.
Abstract principles like "personal freedom" are incoherent and determine nothing. Suddenly, everything a person wants is "personal freedom" and everything they don't want is "personal oppression" or some shit.
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.
Many crimes are driven by poverty. Looking at only drug-related charges is short-sighted. How many crimes are committed by young men whose fathers were ever incarcerated for a drug-related charge?
There seem to be many flaws, but rather than go through them now, I'll assume that only 20% of incarceration is drug-war based.
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.
As an aside, the author of the study clerked for a Reagan appointee (who was also a Hoover Institute fellow), is from an especially conservative law school, and seems to have published so far almost exclusively on this particular topic.
I would personally want to do more research on this person and his writings before taking his entire argument at face value.
It's interesting to see such a true example of the ad hominem fallacy.
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.
His arguments are laid out in detail. His data is available for inspection. Could you explain the relevance of his conservative bonafides? If he were a more typical liberal professor, would that also be relevant?
What I see the author doing as I read his work is finding a lot of ways to use different definitions of terms to determine which offenders count as "drug offenders". His assumptions are notably different from the assumptions of some other researchers. It seems possible to me, at least on first skimming of these articles, that a lot of the differences in the data that Pfaff uses can be accounted for by these alternative definitions of terms.
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.
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.
I did not attack the person, but I questioned modern science and particularly statistics as such. But it is much easier to believe what you read than to think for yourself.
If you don't have time to read the whole thing. There is a summarization on pages 29 & 30.
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.
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.
Ghetto culture and unfair incarceration predates the war on drugs. It's important to address the core problem, not just its symptoms.
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.
If you look at the violent crime offenders in the USA, more than 3/4's of them are locked up for "Aggravated Assault".
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.
It would be interesting to see how many first time felons had previously lost their job/vehicle/family due to short term stays in county jail (and of course why they were locked up).
Completely missing from the article is an estimate of the coupling between drug and non-drug crime (e.g. prostitution or robbery to finance a drug habit, violent conflict vertically and horizontally along the supply chain, tax avoidance, and corruption of police and other government employees). There are also tertiary effects, like drug gangs engaging in additional illegal activities supported by the core competencies of trafficking and violence. This merits an additional study.
Not only is that not completely missing from the paper, it's addressed empirically. The author is particularly concerned with the affect of prior drug arrests on felony charging, with previous drug convictions as a predicate for three-strikes laws, and with the relationship between violent offenders and drug charges --- they turn out to be mostly disjoint cohorts.
The author agrees with you that further study is merited.
That's a nice start, but many members of a drug gang might not ever touch drugs, at least if I can believe The Wire's portrayal of drug organizations and their division of labor. I am also skeptical of the correlation between arrests for drug offenses (where there is no victim to complain) and violent crimes.
The author would be the first to agree that there are questions raised by drug prohibition that we don't have enough data to answer. You should give the paper a close read. It's hard to come away from it thinking that he's blasé about prohibition.
I didn't think that the direct effects of policy of the drug war were considered the primary driver of prison population growth. The abstract (because I don't have time to read the whole thing) doesn't mention how much more money police departments have received, and how their funding rates are directly tied to how much 'crime' they 'fight'. The author lists what he sees as the ways drug war policy could impact prison population growth but the list is meager and does not integrate drug war policy into the broader social and political context.
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.
TLDR: Only 17% of the prison population is made up of drug offenders, making up only 20% of the 5-fold increase in the prison population in the last half century, and the types of legislation available to us would likely not lower that population measurably.
And how many of the other 80% were a result of the collapsed economic and cultural sphere that the war on drugs caused for millions of black families? (emphasis there, because such a large percentage of that huge increase in prison population has been black)
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.
I don't know which article you're arguing against, but it isn't this one. This isn't a case against decriminalization. It's a case that decriminalization of drugs is not enough to end mass incarceration.
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.
Just skimmed the PDF. I believe the war on drugs is responsible for the majority of the offenses reported in the Violent and Property categories. And let's finally face it: had psychedelic therapy options been available, literally no one would get stuck in hard addiction drugs including alcohol. And had cannabis been legal and used to treat depression, large part of the US population would not be psychotic and intermittently suicidal zombies.
It also reminds me of the JRE podcast with an ex-cop where he says that 90% of arrests are due to the war on drugs: https://youtu.be/lHb23-puvLI?t=739
"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."