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"That's a US problem, if our jails weren't hotels maybe criminals would actually fear going there."

I don't know about where you live but jails where I live aren't hotels. In the both the county where I work and the county where I live our jails are packed way beyond capacity and people are sleeping on the floors. Violence and sickness are common. I had a 19 year old male client in jail a few weeks ago who was raped his third night in, and I'm sure that happens a lot more than is reported. There are some scary people behind bars. I'm public defender and I see people in the jail or going there all the time. Grown men cry about having to go to jail. Prisons in my state are worse. No one wants to go there, and you can bet people are afraid of it, terrified. On rare occasion I might get some guy who talks tough and says he doesn't mind prison, but he'll fight like hell to avoid going there and you can bet when he goes down he'll try to get out of there as quick as he can. A stint in prison is no fun filled vacation.

The problem is not that prisons aren't rough enough, it's that we have unrealistic expectations about what sending people to prison can accomplish. We must believe in prison more than any other country in the world because we have the absolute highest number of people behind bars in the world as well as the world's highest per capita incarceration rate. The fact is though that about the only thing prison really does well is keep the really bad people away from the rest of us for a while. That, and soak up money. Prisons are really good at that. Prisons can also act as a deterrent, but there are serious limitations to that, especially when it comes to drugs.

For instance, I can tell you from my experience that drug addicts are almost to a man terrified of going to prison. But they are also drug addicts. Their lives revolve around their addictions. They are great at rationalizing but not worth a darn when it comes to rational thoughts about important things, like staying out of prison. They do what they have to do to feed their addictions and cry like babies when they get caught, desperate for some way to avoid the consequences they have coming.

And the dealers, mules, and manufacturers? Most of them are addicts doing what they do to feed their addictions, so like all addicts their primary concern is avoiding withdrawals and while they might be afraid of prison it is a secondary concern that they will brush aside in order to take care of priority number one. They convince themselves that they can get away with it, and in fact their chances of being caught are much less than those for a violent criminal or a thief or someone else likely to leave victims and witnesses out there hounding the police to make an arrest. These people are busted though left and right and sent to prison, often for a long time, but still there seems to be a never ending supply of them, whether the replacements are in it for money or the drugs.

Are some people deterred from doing these things by the threat of prison? Certainly, but the way the drug markets work there are always enough people left who aren't deterred to get the drugs to people who want them. It doesn't matter that a lot of them go to prison. It doesn't matter that some who would deal in drugs are deterred by the threat of prison. There is a high demand for drugs, a seemingly unlimited number of sources for them, and the people who want these substances always seem to figure out a way to get them. These markets are extremely efficient. The demand attracts the supply and the supply always gets there one way or another.