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It appears to be both a response to increased drug use in the 1960's and 1970's and just maybe a general change in the way we look at things. I really can't give a great answer to that question because frankly I'm a little bewildered by the drastic change in our incarceration rates. Incarceration rates climbed in the 1970's and by 1980 a new record high was reached. The war on drugs kicked in a lot harder in the 1980's. The feds really started getting more and more involved. We hired an awful lot more police officers and they've had to make an awful lot more arrests to justify their existence. We've gotten a lot more aggressive in our police tactics and courts are increasingly allowing police conduct that at one time would have been considered unconstitutional. We have more undercover police and snitches than we ever had.

Even the Game and Fish guys are getting involved. They're out undercover at fishing spots and swimming holes and canoing streams everywhere looking for people breaking the law. I spoke with one of the federal equivalents to our Game and Fish boys the other day in court and he was bragging to me about how effective all this new undercover work is for them, about how it is getting them more arrests than ever. Before when they drove in in marked vehicles people would stop doing whatever it was they were doing that was illegal. Now people will even admit to undercover officers who chat with them dressed as civilians that they don't have fishing licenses, or they might offer to drink beer or smoke marijuana with them or something. They had three of the state guys in court a few weeks back to testify on a big littering case. Three officers where there prepared to testify that this man and his family were at at the river and that they ate a pizza and "purposely" left the pizza box on the car and drove off. The undercover officer called ahead to have the man pulled over by uniformed officers. The officers even had the smoking gun evidence, the pizza box, there to introduce into evidence. I was so disgusted by those jerk -offs that it was all I could do not to cuss them up one side and down the other. What the hell are they wasting my tax dollars on this crap for? Since when did the damned park rangers become the KGB? Those asswipes are out there befriending and spying on people having a good time not hurting anyone. Is this America? What the hell is going on with my country?

That little rant aside, I think a lot of it has to do with the war on drugs. Most of the felony cases our office gets are drug cases. We handle literally thousands of pounds worth of drug cases a year in our small county. Most of the weight comes from drug mule cases where people are paid to drive across the country with big loads of dope in their vehicles. They pretty much all go to prison for a long time, probably longer than the actual kingpin types who own all this dope, in the rare event one of the big guys is ever busted. The other cases are generally little possession cases, possession with intent to deliver, delivery, or manufacturing cases. The delivery cases for the most part involve only tiny amounts of drugs. The buys are almost always conducted by "Confidential Informants" (CI's) who for the most part are druggies who have been busted and threatened by the narcotics officers who tell them how they'll see to it that they spend a long time in prison where they'll get pimped around for packs of cigarettes, unless they go out and make three buys for them, or something like that. These guys will call anyone they know who they might be able to talk into getting them some drugs and then they'll go in with marked money wearing a wire to make the buy. Usually it's something like a half a gram of meth or something, a half a Sweet & Lo package worth. Often I don't think these guys are even real drug dealers. They sure as heck don't have any money. In many cases they're probably just druggies who thinking they are helping out a friend. A lot of these CI's have sold a lot of dope too. Just about all the regular users will get drugs for a friend as a favor and a lot will do it for profit too mostly just to pay for their stash. There aren't any dope stores. People who do dope have to help each other find drugs. They expect it from each other. That's how massive black markets like this work. But even though these people are for the most part little small time dealers selling enough to their druggie friends to get some free dope or even only as a favor, they get treated like kingpins in our system.

A guy I know tried one a few weeks ago where his client was charged with possessing a half a gram of meth with intent to deliver. A CI had allegedly made a buy from the guy, but the CI was not called in to testify. Instead prosecutors introduced forty dollars in buy money from which they had recorded the serial numbers. They had gone in with a warrant based on the info the CI gave them and found the man in possession of a half a gram of meth, and with the buy money and testimony about giving the CI money to buy dope they busted the guy for possession with intent to deliver. One of the jurors even noticed during deliberations that the serials number of the bills the cops claimed the CI gave to the defendant did not match up with the ones they introduced at trial. But the jury convicted the man anyway and gave him thirty years. He had a spotless record prior to this bust. He was a Vietnam vet in his fifties in poor health who quite possibly will not live long enough in prison to ever be paroled out. It may be that he is just a terrible awful guy who has done all sorts of worse crimes for which he was never caught and we will all be better off with him in prison for a long time, even though it will cost us an awful lot of money, but I don't think that is the case with all of these guys. A lot of these guys aren't anywhere close to the stereotypical drug dealers we might think about.

We are just spinning our wheels with this drug thing. Most all of the people going to prison for it are either small timer addicts selling to people they think are their friends so they can make enough to keep in supply themselves and maybe make a little spare change, or they aren't even really dealers at all. They're just druggies who would help other druggies find drugs as a favor. What do we really accomplish when we take a half a gram of meth off the street? Is that going to raise local meth prices and make it harder for people to get these drugs and get addicted to them? Hell no. Are we stopping the flow of the drugs? Absolutely not. Almost every regular drug user out there will help another drug user get drugs as a favor, and a whole lot of them will do it for profit. There is a never ending supply of sources for these drugs. It's not like taking a serial rapist or burglar off the streets and thereby saving his future victims from being victimized. All the "victims" who are victims by virtue of the fact that they on their own volition get drugs from the guy will still have easy access to drugs from any number of other sources. Locking so many people up is not helping our drug problem in this country.

There is one benefit to incarcerating all of these people though. By doing so we will reduce crime some because some of these people are in fact really bad people who commit all sorts of other crimes. That is true. But, I personally would rather we put them in prison for a long time for committing these other more serious crimes instead of for selling a little bit of dope to other dopers. Personally, I'd much rather a druggie sell a little dope to other druggies rather than steal from me. I feel that stealing and a lot of the other crimes some of these people commit is far more morally culpable and far more of a menace to society than conduct consisting of one druggie selling party supplies to another druggie. It's different if they are selling to children, but most of these guys aren't in trouble for selling to kids. Most of the time they're in trouble for selling to other druggie peers of theirs who are generally around the same age as them. But we punish the thirty year old drug addict who sells a tiny amount of dope to a thirty year old drug addict CI like he is selling to ten year olds. We punish him like he is a kingpin. We're angry about drugs and the problems they cause and we take all of our aggression out on anyone who is caught who is involved in delivering drugs even in a very minor way. We aren't really accomplishing what we are setting out to accomplish though by doing this and we are spending an awful lot of money with this shotgun approach that we shouldn't be spending unless it is to keep the really bad people locked up and away from the rest of us for as long as possible.

If it were up to me we'd send far fewer people to prison in the first place, but a lot of those we do end up sending would spend a lot more time than they do today. There is a core of serious offenders and career criminals that need to be in prison for the good of us all, the longer the better. In real life though most of these people plead to relatively short sentences, and since we have overburdened ourselves so by putting too many in prison we are having to let them all out earlier and earlier. Sentences are getting longer. The same politicians doing that though are having to pass new early release laws and new laws reducing the time people must spend before being eligible for parole because our prisons are too full to keep up with the flow of new convicts. A lot of the really bad ones are in and out of prison over and over again spending more time on the outside than on the inside when it would be best for all of us if they spent no time on the outside.

And we don't do a good job at all of keeping track of them after they get out. Shoot, in my state parole officers can hardly revoke parole anymore because our prisons are too full and parolees can only be revoked for committing really serious crimes. We need people standing over these people making sure they get jobs and stay off the drugs and away from bad influences as much as possible. The addicts need to be drug tested all the time to keep them honest and keep them from falling back into their old ways. They need at least small sanctions every time they screw up. We probably won't change many of the hardcore criminals who are addicts but if we keep them under a close enough watch at least they won't be binging so much on drugs and stealing everyone blind to pay for their expensive habits all the time.

A lot of these addicts aren't such hardcore evil criminals. They do tend to get in trouble over and over for drugs, but that is to be expected from addicts. Some of these guys will never quit. Many others won't quit for years even though they'll suffer all sorts of negative consequences from their addictions. That's the nature of the beast. We could probably cut down on a lot of the problems by tightly monitoring them on probation that doesn't end until they spend a year or so testing clean and living like decent human beings with jobs and steady places to live and that sort of thing. If we drug test them all the time and give them small sanctions like a few days in jail or some community service or something every single time they screw up, a lot of them will eventually get tired of it and straighten up. Being a slave to drugs sucks, and it would suck even worse if you kept having to go to jail for it, even if it was only for a few days at a time. For a lot of them this will take years or may never end but at least they won't be able to stay on tons of drugs all the time and get themselves in a position where they have to sell dope and/or steal to pay for their incredibly expensive habits. We'll win the war of attrition with a lot of them and we'll at least be able to keep a lot of the others who won't quit from causing major problems, and we'll do all of this for considerably less than what we would spend sending them to prison over and over again.

I don't know why we are sending so many people to prison these days. All I know is that we could do a lot better job at dealing with societal problems without wasting all the money we waste warehousing so many people. The brunt of the crime problems we have are really caused mostly by a small core of the people who come into contact with the criminal justice system. The only thing prison is really good for is keeping these few off the streets and away from the rest of us for a while. We could probably reduce crime a good bit and save a lot of money if instead of trying to lock up as many people as we can we would try to lock the really bad ones up longer and deal with the rest using other alternatives besides prison.