16 ms·

The War on Drugs and Prison Growth: Limited importance and legislative options [pdf]

91 points by yummyfajitas 11y ago

hodwik 11y ago
Little known fact; the prisons are primarily filled with dangerous criminals.
- mellavora 11y ago
  and how many of them were dangerous criminals BEFORE we locked them up?
  - hodwik 11y ago
    According to this study, most of them.
    - antimagic 11y ago
      It does make you wonder why the US has so many more "violent criminals" compared to other similar Western countries though...
      - hodwik 11y ago
        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.
    - maxerickson 11y ago
      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).
  - tptacek 11y ago
    Presumably the majority who were sentenced for violent offenses?
    - encoderer 11y ago
      Ok, how about: how many would've been violent had they not grown up in a culture where we locked up their dad, cousins and friends?
      - hodwik 11y ago
        If we didn't lock up criminals? I'm going to go out on a limb and say there would be more criminals.
        encoderer 11y ago
        Snark? 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.
        tptacek 11y ago
        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.
        hodwik 11y ago
        That is not true. People who are for drug prohibition simply aren't as loud as those against.
melling 11y ago
Can someone write a tl;dr? Many a day on HN has been spent ranting about the war on drugs and the prison population. e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9490310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9490310
- hodwik 11y ago
  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.
  - adventured 11y ago
    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.
    - tptacek 11y ago
      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.
slasaus 11y ago
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
- javert 11y ago
  Here is the take-away of that: > In reality, a majority of prison growth has come from locking up violent offenders And also: > a large majority of those admitted to prison never serve time for a drug charge
- slasaus 11y ago
  "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.
  - tptacek 11y ago
    You cut the author off before he could finish his point, just a few words later, that many violent offenders also don't belong in prison.
    - 11y ago
adventured 11y ago
Sure it is. 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.
- TillE 11y ago
  Searched the article for the word "gang". No results. There's quite a lot of violent crime that's directly related to and driven by the illegal drug trade.
  - rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
    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.
  - adventured 11y ago
    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.
taeric 11y ago
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.
- kazinator 11y ago
  > There is a summarization on pages 29 & 30. ... corresponding to logical pages 201 and 202.
tptacek 11y ago
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.
- hodwik 11y ago
  NOTE: It doesn't say the War on Drugs does those things, it systematically disproves each one of those beliefs.
  - astazangasta 11y ago
    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.
    - hodwik 11y ago
      Right, I misspoke. They drive up the incarceration rate, but only negligibly. They do not explain the spike in prison populations.
      - fnordfnordfnord 11y ago
        Negligibly? Or is it just not the primary factor?
- justinsb 11y ago
  And most notably ignores the question of whether the war on drugs drives up violent crime.
kazinator 11y ago
Author should define an abbreviation for "War on Drugs" early in the paper instead of repeating the full phrase.
luso_brazilian 11y ago
tl;dr: verbatim from the linked pdf 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 1980 1990 2009 % 1980-1990 %1990-2009 Total 294,000 681,400 1,362,000 Violent 173,300 316,600 724,300 36% 60% Property 89,300 173,700 261,200 22% 13% Drug 19,000 148,600 242,200 33% 14% Other 12,400 45,500 134,500 9% 13% 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
- slasaus 11y ago
  Don't like the 10 vs. 20 year jump there, it would have been nice if they had added statistics for 2000 as well.
  - astazangasta 11y ago
danharaj 11y ago
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.
justinsb 11y ago
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'.
- kazinator 11y ago
  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.
  - justinsb 11y ago
    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!
    - kazinator 11y ago
      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.
kazinator 11y ago
> Only 17% of all prisoners are serving time for drug offenses. Yeah, but 17% is still a large percentage. A 17% reduction would make a difference.
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  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.
  - danharaj 11y ago
    > 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.
    - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
      The practical results of minimized police state flow quite organically from the broader abstract principle.
      - danharaj 11y ago
        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.
encoderer 11y ago
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."
- luso_brazilian 11y ago
  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.
jarsin 11y ago
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.
- tptacek 11y ago
  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
  - tsotha 11y ago
    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.
swehner 11y ago
A strange paper, difficult to follow, not well organized. Perhaps not surprisingly, the author is an economist. I do find it extremely odd when a scholar uses an informal term like "Drug inmate" (for example, p. 180)
- tptacek 11y ago
  No, the author is criminal justice professor famous in academia for empirical study of mass incarceration.
  - swehner 11y ago
    Not sure what "No" refers to. I found this listed under Education at http://www.fordham.edu/info/23171/john_pfaff http://www.fordham.edu/info/23171/john_pfaff : University of Chicago: BA, 1997; JD, 2003; PhD (Economics), 2005
Bud 11y ago
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.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
  - skwirl 11y ago
    It's pretty amazing that anyone on HN would advocate ad hominem as a good way to reach understanding of something. He laid out his arguments and his data. Attack that with your own.
    - PythonicAlpha 11y ago
      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.
- yummyfajitas 11y ago
  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?
  - marcosdumay 11y ago
    I'll venture a yes to both your questions. 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.
kazinator 11y ago
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. Another contributor is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States 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".)
- tptacek 11y ago
  Unless your claim is that sneezing is classified as a "violent crime", the paper appears to refute this point.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - jbapple 11y ago
    > 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.
- maxerickson 11y ago
  This article discusses the prevalence of criminal records: http://www.nij.gov/journals/270/pages/criminal-records.aspx http://www.nij.gov/journals/270/pages/criminal-records.aspx
- makeitsuckless 11y ago
  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. The problem is mostly cultural, not legislative.
ypcx 11y ago
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 https://youtu.be/lHb23-puvLI?t=739
yummyfajitas 11y ago
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.
- tptacek 11y ago
  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.
fukusa 11y ago
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.
rayiner 11y ago
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-23prison.12253738.html?pagewanted=all 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.")
- tptacek 11y ago
  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.
  - rayiner 11y ago
    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.
    - tptacek 11y ago
      It does blame the government!
mdorazio 11y ago
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!" [1] http://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offenses.jsp http://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offens... [2] http://felonvoting.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=004339 http://felonvoting.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=0...
- yummyfajitas 11y ago
  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.
  - mdorazio 11y ago
    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.
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  Federal incarcerations are slanted largely because of their limited criminal jurisdiction. 90% of prisoners are ultimately state prisoners. This from the paper's argument.
tptacek 11y ago
Page 194/22 makes an interesting point: 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.
- simplulo 11y ago
  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.
  - tptacek 11y ago
    I wasn't providing a narrative, I was citing statistics you can get from prisons.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
muerdeme 11y ago
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.
- simplulo 11y ago
  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.
  - tptacek 11y ago
    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.
    - Retric 11y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox 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.
tptacek 11y ago
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.
simplulo 11y ago
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.
- tptacek 11y ago
  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.
  - simplulo 11y ago
    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.
    - tptacek 11y ago
      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.
bdcravens 11y ago
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?
jakeogh 11y ago
Either individuals own themselves or they don't. And if we don't, who does? Where do they get that authority?
argumentum 11y ago
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. That sounds like a great start to me.

91 points by yummyfajitas 11y ago

hodwik 11y ago

Little known fact; the prisons are primarily filled with dangerous criminals.

mellavora 11y ago
and how many of them were dangerous criminals BEFORE we locked them up?
- hodwik 11y ago
  According to this study, most of them.
  - antimagic 11y ago
    It does make you wonder why the US has so many more "violent criminals" compared to other similar Western countries though...
    - hodwik 11y ago
      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.
  - maxerickson 11y ago
    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).
- tptacek 11y ago
  Presumably the majority who were sentenced for violent offenses?
  - encoderer 11y ago
    Ok, how about: how many would've been violent had they not grown up in a culture where we locked up their dad, cousins and friends?
    - hodwik 11y ago
      If we didn't lock up criminals? I'm going to go out on a limb and say there would be more criminals.
      - encoderer 11y ago
        Snark? 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.
        tptacek 11y ago
        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.
        hodwik 11y ago
        That is not true. People who are for drug prohibition simply aren't as loud as those against.

melling 11y ago

Can someone write a tl;dr? Many a day on HN has been spent ranting about the war on drugs and the prison population. e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9490310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9490310

hodwik 11y ago
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.
- adventured 11y ago
  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.
  - tptacek 11y ago
    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.

slasaus 11y ago

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

javert 11y ago
Here is the take-away of that: > In reality, a majority of prison growth has come from locking up violent offenders And also: > a large majority of those admitted to prison never serve time for a drug charge
slasaus 11y ago
"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.
- tptacek 11y ago
  You cut the author off before he could finish his point, just a few words later, that many violent offenders also don't belong in prison.
  - 11y ago

adventured 11y ago

Sure it is. 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.

TillE 11y ago
Searched the article for the word "gang". No results. There's quite a lot of violent crime that's directly related to and driven by the illegal drug trade.
- rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
  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.
- adventured 11y ago
  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.

taeric 11y ago

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.

kazinator 11y ago
> There is a summarization on pages 29 & 30. ... corresponding to logical pages 201 and 202.

tptacek 11y ago

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.

hodwik 11y ago
NOTE: It doesn't say the War on Drugs does those things, it systematically disproves each one of those beliefs.
- astazangasta 11y ago
  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.
  - hodwik 11y ago
    Right, I misspoke. They drive up the incarceration rate, but only negligibly. They do not explain the spike in prison populations.
    - fnordfnordfnord 11y ago
      Negligibly? Or is it just not the primary factor?
justinsb 11y ago
And most notably ignores the question of whether the war on drugs drives up violent crime.

kazinator 11y ago

Author should define an abbreviation for "War on Drugs" early in the paper instead of repeating the full phrase.

luso_brazilian 11y ago

tl;dr: verbatim from the linked pdf 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 1980 1990 2009 % 1980-1990 %1990-2009 Total 294,000 681,400 1,362,000 Violent 173,300 316,600 724,300 36% 60% Property 89,300 173,700 261,200 22% 13% Drug 19,000 148,600 242,200 33% 14% Other 12,400 45,500 134,500 9% 13% 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

slasaus 11y ago
Don't like the 10 vs. 20 year jump there, it would have been nice if they had added statistics for 2000 as well.
- astazangasta 11y ago

danharaj 11y ago

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.

justinsb 11y ago

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'.

kazinator 11y ago
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.
- justinsb 11y ago
  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!
  - kazinator 11y ago
    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.

kazinator 11y ago

> Only 17% of all prisoners are serving time for drug offenses. Yeah, but 17% is still a large percentage. A 17% reduction would make a difference.

vezzy-fnord 11y ago
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.
- danharaj 11y ago
  > 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.
  - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
    The practical results of minimized police state flow quite organically from the broader abstract principle.
    - danharaj 11y ago
      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.

encoderer 11y ago

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."

luso_brazilian 11y ago
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.

jarsin 11y ago

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.

tptacek 11y ago
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
- tsotha 11y ago
  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.

swehner 11y ago

A strange paper, difficult to follow, not well organized. Perhaps not surprisingly, the author is an economist. I do find it extremely odd when a scholar uses an informal term like "Drug inmate" (for example, p. 180)

tptacek 11y ago
No, the author is criminal justice professor famous in academia for empirical study of mass incarceration.
- swehner 11y ago
  Not sure what "No" refers to. I found this listed under Education at http://www.fordham.edu/info/23171/john_pfaff http://www.fordham.edu/info/23171/john_pfaff : University of Chicago: BA, 1997; JD, 2003; PhD (Economics), 2005

Bud 11y ago

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.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
- skwirl 11y ago
  It's pretty amazing that anyone on HN would advocate ad hominem as a good way to reach understanding of something. He laid out his arguments and his data. Attack that with your own.
  - PythonicAlpha 11y ago
    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.
yummyfajitas 11y ago
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?
- marcosdumay 11y ago
  I'll venture a yes to both your questions. 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.

kazinator 11y ago

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. Another contributor is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States 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".)

tptacek 11y ago
Unless your claim is that sneezing is classified as a "violent crime", the paper appears to refute this point.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- jbapple 11y ago
  > 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.
maxerickson 11y ago
This article discusses the prevalence of criminal records: http://www.nij.gov/journals/270/pages/criminal-records.aspx http://www.nij.gov/journals/270/pages/criminal-records.aspx
makeitsuckless 11y ago
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. The problem is mostly cultural, not legislative.

ypcx 11y ago

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 https://youtu.be/lHb23-puvLI?t=739

yummyfajitas 11y ago

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.

tptacek 11y ago
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.

fukusa 11y ago

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.

rayiner 11y ago

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-23prison.12253738.html?pagewanted=all 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.")

tptacek 11y ago
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.
- rayiner 11y ago
  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.
  - tptacek 11y ago
    It does blame the government!

mdorazio 11y ago

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!" [1] http://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offenses.jsp http://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offens... [2] http://felonvoting.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=004339 http://felonvoting.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=0...

yummyfajitas 11y ago
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.
- mdorazio 11y ago
  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.
vezzy-fnord 11y ago
Federal incarcerations are slanted largely because of their limited criminal jurisdiction. 90% of prisoners are ultimately state prisoners. This from the paper's argument.

tptacek 11y ago

Page 194/22 makes an interesting point: 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.

simplulo 11y ago
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.
- tptacek 11y ago
  I wasn't providing a narrative, I was citing statistics you can get from prisons.

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muerdeme 11y ago

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.

simplulo 11y ago
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.
- tptacek 11y ago
  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.
  - Retric 11y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox 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.

tptacek 11y ago

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.

simplulo 11y ago

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.

tptacek 11y ago
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.
- simplulo 11y ago
  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.
  - tptacek 11y ago
    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.

bdcravens 11y ago

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?

jakeogh 11y ago

Either individuals own themselves or they don't. And if we don't, who does? Where do they get that authority?

argumentum 11y ago

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. That sounds like a great start to me.