A Few Words on Incarceration Rates in the U.S. and the "War on Drugs"

Chart from Wikipedia article on incarceration in U.S.

An issue that has been "under the radar" during the 2012 Presidential campaigns of both parties -- and ignored for all practical purposes in congressional races around the United States -- is the efficacy of the "War on Drugs" and the much broader problem in the United States of putting so much of our population in prison.

The United States not only has the most number of people in prison in the world, but it has the highest incarceration rate among its population in the world.  More people per capita go to prison in the U.S. than anywhere else. Evidently, people who live in the U.S. are the biggest bunch of criminals anywhere. Either that or the U.S. criminal justice system is broken.


As can be seen in the chart top right, which is reliable and backed up by numerous data sources, since 1980 the U.S. prison population has exploded. There are five times as many people in prison today in the U.S. as there were in 1980: for every one person in prison in the U.S. in 1980 five people are now in prison. Costs for prisons (and the criminal justice system in general) are rising rapidly and plain and simple breaking many state budgets.

There are numerous problems with our criminal justice system, even if we can simply slip aside the fact that a substantial part of the population is locked up to benefit the rest of the population. For example, the death penalty, which is extraordinarily expensive to implement and does not appear to deter crime. (Why does the death penalty not work? The fact is that most murders are "crimes of passion," not carefully thought through schemes unlike on t.v. The killers don't plan on getting caught, and the remainder aren't mulling over the penalty. If one is serious about reducing murder, one does not rely on the death penalty to do it; one reduces the easy accessibility to handguns. but I digress.)

The biggest problem is that we are putting so many people in prison based on drug crimes. Now let's be clear: we do not want drug dealers or drug cartels to profit. Yet the "War on Drugs" has failed; I don't think there is a lot of doubt about this. The sad thing (or one of them -- there are so many sad things about this) is that the U.S. had a good historical precedent to know it would not work and, indeed, would foster criminal enterprises -- indeed, foster particularly brutal ones. That historical example was prohibition. We know from prohibition's failure that criminalizing use of a substance provides for the financial wherewithal of criminals, pushes ineffectively against human addictions without treating them, and does so mostly to further moral prerogatives.

The "War on Drugs" costs about $40 billion annually. That's 18 times the total annual budget of the FDA. A part of that $40 billion goes to other countries; the payments are an attempt to impose U.S. policy on those countries at great cost. From its beginnings in the Reagan administration, the "War on Drugs" has been used as an extension of attempts to implement non-drug policy agendas as well as to fight against U.S. illicit drug manufacture and traffic.

Your author does not, in fact, use any illegal drugs (though readers may question my state of mind on some of my posts). Yet it is evident that what would help us is to aggressively regulate drugs, provide ready treatment for abuse, and impose and collect taxes on their sale. Regulating and taxing are an approach that worked better with alcohol; there's no reason to think it would not work as well for other drugs. The U.S. could use the cash, and it would be nice to reduce idiotic expenses, you know, like the cost of incarcerating more people than anywhere else in the world.

Parts of this post previously appeared in my mega post Why I am Not a Republican.