---
How about less prisoners, especially noncriminal ones...
Libertarian ping! To be added or removed from my ping list freepmail me or post a message here.
Posted on 10/28/2005 3:42:12 PM PDT by JTN
More than half a million people were behind bars for drug offenses in the United States at the end of last year, according to numbers from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. In a report released Sunday, Prisoners in 2004, the Justice Department number-crunchers found that people sentenced for drug crimes accounted for 21% of state prisoners and 55% of all federal prisoners.
This report did not quantify the number of jail inmates doing time on drug charges in 2004, but an earlier BJS report put the percentage of jail inmates doing time for drug crime at 24.7% in 2002. Given the slow upward trend in drug prisoners as a percentage of all jail prisoners, DRCNet estimates that given a mid-year 2004 jail population of 714,000, approximately one-quarter, or 178,000 people were sitting in jail on drug charges at that time. With 178,000 drug prisoners in jail, more than 87,000 federal drug prisoners, and more than 266,000 state drug prisoners, the total number of people doing time for drugs in the United States last year exceeded 530,000.
Drug war prisoners make up only about one-fourth of an all-time high 2,268,000 people behind bars in the US, up 1.9% from 2003. But while the imprisonment juggernaut continues to roll along, there are faint signs that its growth is slowing. Last year's 1.9% increase in prison and jail population was lower than the year before (2.0%) and lower than the 3.2% average annual growth rate for the past decade.
Of the nearly 2.7 million people behind bars last year, 50.5% were serving time for violent crime. That means that more than 1.3 million people were imprisoned for nonviolent offenses, mainly property and drug crimes.
The still rising prison population comes after a decade of declines in violent and property crime. According to the FBI's annual Uniform Crime Reports, violent crime declined 2.2% last year and has dropped a whopping 32% since 1995. Property crime rates have also declined, although not so dramatically, dropping 23% since 1985.
Even as violent and property crime rates have declined, drug arrests have continued to climb, reaching more than 1.7 million last year. The consequences of those arrests show up in the ever-increasing drug war prisoner numbers.
With an incarceration rate of 724 per 100,000 inhabitants, the United States is the unchallenged world leader in both raw numbers and imprisonment per capita. With a global prison population estimated at nine million, the US accounts for about one-quarter of all prisoners on the planet. In terms of raw numbers, only China, with almost four times the population of the US, comes close with about 1.5 million prisoners. Our closer competitors in incarceration rates are Russia (638 per 100,000) and Belarus (554), according to the British government's World Prison Population report.
"The nation does not have to lock more people up to have safer communities," said Jason Ziedenberg, executive director of the Justice Policy Institute, a sentencing reform research and advocacy group. "Rather than lead the world with the highest incarceration rate, we should follow the states and regions that are reducing prison populations, reducing crime, and investing in communities."
"The overall numbers are sort of discouraging," said Marc Mauer, assistant director of the sentencing reform group The Sentencing Project. "Crime has gone down for 10 years now, but prison numbers are still going up. This is in large part due to the impact of harsher sentencing policies, like three-strikes laws and cutbacks in parole. In recent years, we have not seen a dramatic change in the number of people going to prison; it's just that people are being held longer in prison," he told DRCNet. "It is not clear that this harsh sentencing provides a lot of additional benefits in terms of public safety, and it is expensive both in terms of dollars and in its impact on people's lives."
The numbers for drug offenders were equally discouraging. "We have almost half a million people behind bars for drug offenses," Mauer pointed out. "We had a record number of drug arrests last year. In recent years, we've seen hundreds of drug courts open up, but that doesn't appear to be significantly cutting into the growth of drug prisoners."
Especially notable this year was the continuing increase in women prisoners. Their numbers increased 4% to nearly 105,000, continuing the steady rise in their numbers over the past decade. In 1995, 68,000 women were behind bars. A larger percentage of women state prisoners, 31% are doing time for drug crimes than are men (21%).
"The increase in women prisoners is very much related to drug issues, even more so than men," said Mauer. "Women are more likely to be locked up for a drug offense."
Black and Hispanic prisoners are also more likely to be doing drug war time. More than a quarter of black and Hispanic prisoners are serving drug sentences, compared to less than 15% of white prisoners.
The federal prisoner population increased by 4.2% last year, with fully half of that increase driven by new drug prisoners. The number of people doing federal time for drug offenses has exploded in the last decade, increased from 53,000 in 1995 to 2003's 87,000. The Federal Bureau of Prisons is now the largest prison system in the land, with 180,000 inmates, followed by Texas (168,000), California (167,000), and Florida (86,000). The federal system is now at 40% over capacity, BJS reported.
While some criminologists have argued that crime has gone down precisely because so many people are in prison, not everyone is buying that argument. "Imprisoning large numbers of people has some effect on crime, but there is a point of diminishing returns," argued the Sentencing Project's Mauer. "Initial research shows that maybe a quarter of the decline in violent crime is due to incarceration, but that means three-quarters isn't. The rest has something to do with a relatively healthy economy in the 1990s, the reduction in crime and violence associated with the maturing of the crack cocaine epidemic in the early 1990s, and the efforts by police in some cities to reduce the flow of guns."
Violent and property crime is down, but discretionary drug arrests continue to go through the roof. "If police are looking to increase arrests," said Mauer, "drug arrests are easy. Low-level drug possession cases are plentiful if you want to make and prosecute them. That doesn't mean it's necessarily a great idea."
ping
What's with the "b" symbols? Trying to bold the headline when you can't?
Looks like we aren't done locking up the bad guys.
We're seeing the emergence of a new ethnic group - Incarcero-Americans!
They already outnumber Native Americans. Isn't that special!
And the point of this is what? That we need more prisons?
Good. Fewer dopeheads on the street to break into my house or car, commit DUI, burn down the apartment building when their meth lab goes bad, etc.
Um...well...yes.
Nice try. You forgot (font size=9>
And not one of them are behind bars for smoking pot. I wonder what they did...
Thanks for the tip. My HTML chops, eh, not so good.
Instead of imprisonment, bring back the chain gangs and resurface the hi-ways and by-ways, pick up trash, etc.
So should we buy stock in Zyklon-B ?
"Thanks for the tip. My HTML chops, eh, not so good."
I think he is lying through his teeth.
If we were really in a drug war, we would shoot every pusher, dealer, maker, mule or grower of criminal drugs.
These types of people put more kids on the road to ruin than anything else.
Libertarian ping! To be added or removed from my ping list freepmail me or post a message here.
I see some problems here.
1. Drug users often do commit crimes to support their habits, but this is largely due to the fact that the black market status drives the price up to a ridiculous point.
2. From the article: "Imprisoning large numbers of people has some effect on crime, but there is a point of diminishing returns," argued the Sentencing Project's Mauer. "Initial research shows that maybe a quarter of the decline in violent crime is due to incarceration, but that means three-quarters isn't. The rest has something to do with a relatively healthy economy in the 1990s, the reduction in crime and violence associated with the maturing of the crack cocaine epidemic in the early 1990s, and the efforts by police in some cities to reduce the flow of guns."
3. I don't know whether or not there are any statistics to back this up, but some have argued that due to the large prison population, violent offenders must be released in order to make room for nonviolent drug offenders.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.