8 ms·

It’s Not Just the Drug War (2015)

79 points by e12e 10y ago

jacobush 10y ago
TLDR: even if we removed drug offenses from prison AND all the black population from prisons, the US would STILL have a HUGE prison population compared to any western country. Why? Because from the 1980s all branches, police, judges and legislators have together increased sentences for all crimes. A LOT. Probably needlessly if going by recidivism.
- bilbo0s 10y ago
  It was also a surprise, to me at least, that even if you released all of the people in jail for drug offenses, it would really only affect certain black demographics. That's something I hadn't realized. Basically a HUGE affect on the number of blacks in prison, but almost no affect on the number of whites and latinos in prison. And whites and latinos are overrepresented in the prison population in a relatively draconian way compared to Europe. (Just not as overrepresented as blacks. I'm assuming because of the asymmetry in enforcement of drug laws.) So we are using these sentencing laws to send EVERYONE to prison for a long time, regardless of the crime. It makes me wonder how many crimes actually land you in prison? Probably some things I don't even know about will put you there.
  - hackermailman 10y ago
    Texas Tribune keeps stats on their state prisons https://www.texastribune.org/library/data/texas-prisons/ https://www.texastribune.org/library/data/texas-prisons/ Seems to be mainly robbery, drug possession and drunk driving convictions.
    - John23832 10y ago
      A drunk driving conviction is a drunk driving conviction... I'm ok with that. Especially if it's your 3rd time. I do wonder if there is some cause and effect in play with robberies and the assaults. Being from a poverty stricken area, most of the robberies and assaults I witnessed (in my area) were just from poor people arguing about what little value they have. Or drugs. I also would like to see the drug possessions broken down into type of drug. I suspect marijuana possession is still a large part of that. <1G of weed is different than heroin.
      - jacobush 10y ago
        But fuck, life in prison for drunk driving three times? How about foot chain, mandatory visits to parole officer, or prison until convicted is of age 30 and above? (Less recidivism above a certain age.)
        John23832 10y ago
        This is just my opinion, but if you get two passes for drunk driving and you do it a third time... that's your fault. Also from the data, very few inmates get more than 10-20 for drunk driving. Those are also probably people who have way more than 3 convictions, or have committed egregious drunk driving. We might want to look at what is causing you to drunk drive (addiction, which should be a medical issue and not a legal one), but something should be done after your third time.
        saiya-jin 10y ago
        hell, I knew US is a effed up police state these days, but even a possibility of life for 3 times driving drunk? that's not western democracy, that's 3rd world fascist dictatorship in a hardcore flavor (FYI, I rarely drink and if yes its max few beers/wine only, would never drive under influence) maybe if you are living daily in such a broken environment it starts to feel more normal, but seriously guys... get a grip and try to come up with something that actually solves problems and not just destroys lives permanently. I don't want to travel to US for same reasons I don't travel to Afghanistan or South Sudan - some good people, but messed up system and you don't want to accidentally see the darker side of it
        John23832 10y ago
        You didn't look at the stats... You're not getting a life sentence just for driving drunk a third time. You may get one for killing someone (or multiple people) while driving drunk, but not just for driving drunk. Look, I'm left of left, but there should be punishments for negative behavior.
        10y ago
    - e12e 10y ago
      Speaking of statistics, on a related note, The Guardian keeps a tally of people killed by police in the US: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/... Looks like numbers for January 2017 isn't in yet.
- valuearb 10y ago
  Problem is the article is entirely wrong to be dismissive of the effects of the drug war. The author says that prisons aren't full of low level drug offenders, and I believe them. But that doesn't mean it's not full of people who • violently assaulted a user who stole or didn't pay for drugs. • violently assaulted a dealer in order to steal their drugs and or cash. • murdered someone they believed was cooperating with the police and implicating them in drug trafficking. • sold drugs while being armed with illegal weapons in order to protect themselves and their illegal business. • etc. The entire premise of the article is wrong, rendering it moot.
dandare 10y ago
Summary: gibberish >it’s not primarily the War on Drugs that’s driving this beast. Instead, it’s an all-out assault that “extends a brute egalitarianism across the board.” What that does even mean?
- jbrackett 10y ago
  My interpretation is that they trying to make the point that it's not just the "War on Drugs" that is causing this massive spike in prison population but is instead being driven by increasing penalties across the board, including increasing the number serving life, stated or otherwise, without possibility of parole. They make this point while acknowledging that the "War on Drugs" does disproportionately affect African Americans and women. Throughout the article they make several statements that indicate to me they think there should be more discretion allowed on deciding which punitive actions should be taken.
  - jacobush 10y ago
    My take-away is that not only has some discretion been dis-allowed, but that some discretion is still allowed but stays unused, for some reason. Tough-on-crime and all that.
  - cnnsucks 10y ago
    > more discretion Discretion is a big part of how we ended up with "three strikes" and mandatory minimums. People have not forgotten the outrageous abuses of discretion that were common in the '70s and '80s; activist judges abusing their discretion are not a figment of the right wing knuckle dragger imagination and it was routine for some judge to create a headline with lenient sentences that offended all sensibility. The problem extends to prosecutorial discretion as well; this [1] sort of headline from this past Wednesday -- again illustrating the failure of the justice system and reinforcing our current state of affairs -- is still very common and does not escape notice, no matter how much you might wish it would. Then you have the abuses we see on the national stage regarding "prosecutorial discretion" in immigration policy, selective prosecution of violations of classified information handling we've seen recently, and many, many others. It only takes a few activist judges or prosecutors to polarize an electorate. Right or wrong that's the actual world we live in and ignoring that reality won't ever work. [1] http://www.thesmokinggun.com/buster/drunk-driving/thirteen-time-loser-174935 http://www.thesmokinggun.com/buster/drunk-driving/thirteen-t...
jMyles 10y ago
OK. That was a longer read than I expected. And it had some good parts. The premise, however, is not supported by the text, for several reasons. The most obvious is that, other than a brief mention of prohibition as a "proximate" cause of incarceration, there is no analysis of the degree to which drug prohibition is an underlying cause of violent and other crime, for which the author correctly points out sentences have become longer and commutations more rare. Although the exact value of the illicit drug trade in the United States is difficult to measure with precision, most researchers agree that it's in the neighborhood of $100 billion on in retail trades alone. The reality of life in poverty, and especially urban black poverty, is that there is no other market of similar size where entry-level jobs are as available or unencumbered. And this giant market, of course, lives almost entirely outside the civil justice system or any other mechanism for peaceful resolution of disputes. In addition, there are many people who, instead of rising the ranks of criminal enterprise and eventually becoming kingpins, become addicted ("high on their own supply") and are then in a position of constantly needing to rob or steal to pay back debts to heavy-handed, higher-ranking drug dealers. In short, I think that if the author accounts for the number of violent criminals incarcerated for crimes committed as a consequence of the drug trade, it is very likely that "it is just the drug war (and yes, some overzealousness about 'sex crimes')."
- jacobush 10y ago
  Sounds plausible to me! Someone, please crunch the numbers/do more research. :-/
- maxerickson 10y ago
  Do the people on the receiving end of drug related violence consistently report it to the police? I sort of think not. And most violent crime isn't murder (which police will tend to investigate if there is a body, so less dependence on reporting there).
  - ensignavenger 10y ago
    I imagine that most convenience stores that get held up by a drug addict probably do report it. If your drug dealer breaks your legs because you didn't pay them back, you may not report that... so I would hypothesize that there is likely a pretty good mix of reported and unreported drug related violence.
Callmenorm 10y ago
One part that seems weird is: >If we truly want to help people who are coming out of prison or to keep people from going to prison, then we need a public-sector expansion with real jobs that pay a living wage, not the contingent kind that pay a minimum wage. What kind of jobs would these be? Construction, administration, or what? It's not clear how the public sector creates hundreds of thousands of meaningful jobs. I don't count the TSA as meaningful, BTW.
- falcolas 10y ago
  We have a lot of public infrastructure which needs love (i.e. construction); but of course the money to do this isn't there in the first place.
  - jacobush 10y ago
    No, that money is already spent bombing other peoples' infrastructure. And war on drugs. And F22s. Bank bailouts. Take your pick.
  - funnyfacts365 10y ago
    Of course the money isn't there, you guys spent it all on war during the last 3 decades. 14trillion dollars! Imperial trillions, of course, but even so... Let that number sink in.
  - virmundi 10y ago
    I know we do, but most of it is transient. A road job constructing the expansion of I-69 north of Indianapolis takes 6 years. That's great. People can be employed 6 years on that job, maybe (seems to go in spurts, don't know if they get paid for the downtime). At the end of that 6 years, construction moves on. Money goes to another state, or another part of the state outside of a commute. What do you do then? If properly constructed, that 6 year road project won't need more than minor maintenance for years. Sure 6-ish guys keep a job in the area, but the several hundred lose theirs. This pattern of popup work repeats across the country. Federal expansion programs are not sustainable. They can help, but ultimately you need the private sector to create jobs by selling goods and services.
0xcde4c3db 10y ago
Gottschalk uses a term I'm unfamiliar with: "race liberals". Does anyone know what the definition or typical usage pattern of this term is? Is it specific to some particular academic field or political clique? I'm not finding very good examples with Google (which thinks that "race, liberals" and "race. Liberals" are good matches).
- richmarr 10y ago
  > "...race liberals ran roughshod over deep concerns expressed by other liberals and some experts on crime and punishment that the quest for more proceduralism untethered to substantive goals in criminal justice would yield a more punitive criminal justice system" Outside the actual meaning intended for 'race liberals' it does seem like a case of labelling with the intent to paint a non-neutral narrative. The 'race liberals' ran roughshod. The other liberals concerns were deep, and supported by experts, and the proceduralism was apparently not tethered to any goals. This paragraph at least seems more fiction than non-fiction.
  - Tloewald 10y ago
    The sentence is a little tough to unpack but it's saying that emphasizing procedure (rules) with a focus on race rather than improving criminal justice more broadly could yield a more punitive system. It's describing a difference of opinion, and this opinion seems reasonable. I assume a "race liberal" is someone who is liberal with respect to race just as a "social conservative" might be pro union and pro welfare but anti gay and anti abortion.
    - richmarr 10y ago
      > ...emphasizing procedure (rules) with a focus on race rather than improving criminal justice more broadly could yield a more punitive system... I assume a "race liberal" ... I'm not aware anyone in this thread is having difficulty 'unpacking' the sentence, or extrapolating the broad meaning of the term 'race liberal'. If you read the parent's comment in a more generous frame of mind you'll realise that they were probably interested in exactly how this term has been applied in the past. My own comment was regarding the way the author presented a narrative, using labels without describing who she was actually talking about, criticising their actions without describing what they actually did. This narrative proclaims that a group did something without evidence or even goals, against the deep wishes of others, including experts. Does it seem likely that they didn't have goals (after all the qualifier 'substantive' is deeply subjective)? Does it seem likely that all the experts were opposed? Does it seem likely that only the opposing side had deep concerns?
logfromblammo 10y ago
Being a prosecutor and having compassion are largely incompatible. If you can't smother that part of yourself, you get fed up with putting people in prison--essentially for being poor--and quit in disgust. That creates a vicious cycle, wherein the cruelty of disproportionately severe prosecutions drives out those who would not pursue them. When the people with the most convictions and longest sentences for the worst offenses get promoted, whether the criminals deserved them or not, it affects the workplace culture. Perhaps it would be better to force the state's criminal-court attorneys to spend equal time as prosecutors and as public defenders, and promote based on criteria other than win-loss ratio.
- Zigurd 10y ago
  Being a prosecutor is also a stepping stone for politicians. Which makes selecting for smart ambitious cruel assholes even worse.
- EdHominem 10y ago
  > Perhaps it would be better to force the state's criminal-court attorneys to spend equal time as prosecutors and as public defenders That's a brilliant idea. What better way to find systematic holes in the system than by making the same people fight against them half the time, and making their reviews based on an equal amount of prosecution and defense? Even if we still just went by the numbers (which we would, it's easy) at least it wouldn't be so one-sided.

79 points by e12e 10y ago

TLDR: even if we removed drug offenses from prison AND all the black population from prisons, the US would STILL have a HUGE prison population compared to any western country. Why? Because from the 1980s all branches, police, judges and legislators have together increased sentences for all crimes. A LOT. Probably needlessly if going by recidivism.

bilbo0s 10y ago
It was also a surprise, to me at least, that even if you released all of the people in jail for drug offenses, it would really only affect certain black demographics. That's something I hadn't realized. Basically a HUGE affect on the number of blacks in prison, but almost no affect on the number of whites and latinos in prison. And whites and latinos are overrepresented in the prison population in a relatively draconian way compared to Europe. (Just not as overrepresented as blacks. I'm assuming because of the asymmetry in enforcement of drug laws.) So we are using these sentencing laws to send EVERYONE to prison for a long time, regardless of the crime. It makes me wonder how many crimes actually land you in prison? Probably some things I don't even know about will put you there.
- hackermailman 10y ago
  Texas Tribune keeps stats on their state prisons https://www.texastribune.org/library/data/texas-prisons/ https://www.texastribune.org/library/data/texas-prisons/ Seems to be mainly robbery, drug possession and drunk driving convictions.
  - John23832 10y ago
    A drunk driving conviction is a drunk driving conviction... I'm ok with that. Especially if it's your 3rd time. I do wonder if there is some cause and effect in play with robberies and the assaults. Being from a poverty stricken area, most of the robberies and assaults I witnessed (in my area) were just from poor people arguing about what little value they have. Or drugs. I also would like to see the drug possessions broken down into type of drug. I suspect marijuana possession is still a large part of that. <1G of weed is different than heroin.
    - jacobush 10y ago
      But fuck, life in prison for drunk driving three times? How about foot chain, mandatory visits to parole officer, or prison until convicted is of age 30 and above? (Less recidivism above a certain age.)
      - John23832 10y ago
        This is just my opinion, but if you get two passes for drunk driving and you do it a third time... that's your fault. Also from the data, very few inmates get more than 10-20 for drunk driving. Those are also probably people who have way more than 3 convictions, or have committed egregious drunk driving. We might want to look at what is causing you to drunk drive (addiction, which should be a medical issue and not a legal one), but something should be done after your third time.
        saiya-jin 10y ago
        hell, I knew US is a effed up police state these days, but even a possibility of life for 3 times driving drunk? that's not western democracy, that's 3rd world fascist dictatorship in a hardcore flavor (FYI, I rarely drink and if yes its max few beers/wine only, would never drive under influence) maybe if you are living daily in such a broken environment it starts to feel more normal, but seriously guys... get a grip and try to come up with something that actually solves problems and not just destroys lives permanently. I don't want to travel to US for same reasons I don't travel to Afghanistan or South Sudan - some good people, but messed up system and you don't want to accidentally see the darker side of it
        John23832 10y ago
        You didn't look at the stats... You're not getting a life sentence just for driving drunk a third time. You may get one for killing someone (or multiple people) while driving drunk, but not just for driving drunk. Look, I'm left of left, but there should be punishments for negative behavior.
        10y ago
  - e12e 10y ago
    Speaking of statistics, on a related note, The Guardian keeps a tally of people killed by police in the US: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/... Looks like numbers for January 2017 isn't in yet.
valuearb 10y ago
Problem is the article is entirely wrong to be dismissive of the effects of the drug war. The author says that prisons aren't full of low level drug offenders, and I believe them. But that doesn't mean it's not full of people who • violently assaulted a user who stole or didn't pay for drugs. • violently assaulted a dealer in order to steal their drugs and or cash. • murdered someone they believed was cooperating with the police and implicating them in drug trafficking. • sold drugs while being armed with illegal weapons in order to protect themselves and their illegal business. • etc. The entire premise of the article is wrong, rendering it moot.

dandare 10y ago

Summary: gibberish >it’s not primarily the War on Drugs that’s driving this beast. Instead, it’s an all-out assault that “extends a brute egalitarianism across the board.” What that does even mean?

jbrackett 10y ago
My interpretation is that they trying to make the point that it's not just the "War on Drugs" that is causing this massive spike in prison population but is instead being driven by increasing penalties across the board, including increasing the number serving life, stated or otherwise, without possibility of parole. They make this point while acknowledging that the "War on Drugs" does disproportionately affect African Americans and women. Throughout the article they make several statements that indicate to me they think there should be more discretion allowed on deciding which punitive actions should be taken.
- jacobush 10y ago
  My take-away is that not only has some discretion been dis-allowed, but that some discretion is still allowed but stays unused, for some reason. Tough-on-crime and all that.
- cnnsucks 10y ago
  > more discretion Discretion is a big part of how we ended up with "three strikes" and mandatory minimums. People have not forgotten the outrageous abuses of discretion that were common in the '70s and '80s; activist judges abusing their discretion are not a figment of the right wing knuckle dragger imagination and it was routine for some judge to create a headline with lenient sentences that offended all sensibility. The problem extends to prosecutorial discretion as well; this [1] sort of headline from this past Wednesday -- again illustrating the failure of the justice system and reinforcing our current state of affairs -- is still very common and does not escape notice, no matter how much you might wish it would. Then you have the abuses we see on the national stage regarding "prosecutorial discretion" in immigration policy, selective prosecution of violations of classified information handling we've seen recently, and many, many others. It only takes a few activist judges or prosecutors to polarize an electorate. Right or wrong that's the actual world we live in and ignoring that reality won't ever work. [1] http://www.thesmokinggun.com/buster/drunk-driving/thirteen-time-loser-174935 http://www.thesmokinggun.com/buster/drunk-driving/thirteen-t...

jMyles 10y ago

OK. That was a longer read than I expected. And it had some good parts. The premise, however, is not supported by the text, for several reasons. The most obvious is that, other than a brief mention of prohibition as a "proximate" cause of incarceration, there is no analysis of the degree to which drug prohibition is an underlying cause of violent and other crime, for which the author correctly points out sentences have become longer and commutations more rare. Although the exact value of the illicit drug trade in the United States is difficult to measure with precision, most researchers agree that it's in the neighborhood of $100 billion on in retail trades alone. The reality of life in poverty, and especially urban black poverty, is that there is no other market of similar size where entry-level jobs are as available or unencumbered. And this giant market, of course, lives almost entirely outside the civil justice system or any other mechanism for peaceful resolution of disputes. In addition, there are many people who, instead of rising the ranks of criminal enterprise and eventually becoming kingpins, become addicted ("high on their own supply") and are then in a position of constantly needing to rob or steal to pay back debts to heavy-handed, higher-ranking drug dealers. In short, I think that if the author accounts for the number of violent criminals incarcerated for crimes committed as a consequence of the drug trade, it is very likely that "it is just the drug war (and yes, some overzealousness about 'sex crimes')."

jacobush 10y ago
Sounds plausible to me! Someone, please crunch the numbers/do more research. :-/
maxerickson 10y ago
Do the people on the receiving end of drug related violence consistently report it to the police? I sort of think not. And most violent crime isn't murder (which police will tend to investigate if there is a body, so less dependence on reporting there).
- ensignavenger 10y ago
  I imagine that most convenience stores that get held up by a drug addict probably do report it. If your drug dealer breaks your legs because you didn't pay them back, you may not report that... so I would hypothesize that there is likely a pretty good mix of reported and unreported drug related violence.

Callmenorm 10y ago

One part that seems weird is: >If we truly want to help people who are coming out of prison or to keep people from going to prison, then we need a public-sector expansion with real jobs that pay a living wage, not the contingent kind that pay a minimum wage. What kind of jobs would these be? Construction, administration, or what? It's not clear how the public sector creates hundreds of thousands of meaningful jobs. I don't count the TSA as meaningful, BTW.

falcolas 10y ago
We have a lot of public infrastructure which needs love (i.e. construction); but of course the money to do this isn't there in the first place.
- jacobush 10y ago
  No, that money is already spent bombing other peoples' infrastructure. And war on drugs. And F22s. Bank bailouts. Take your pick.
- funnyfacts365 10y ago
  Of course the money isn't there, you guys spent it all on war during the last 3 decades. 14trillion dollars! Imperial trillions, of course, but even so... Let that number sink in.
- virmundi 10y ago
  I know we do, but most of it is transient. A road job constructing the expansion of I-69 north of Indianapolis takes 6 years. That's great. People can be employed 6 years on that job, maybe (seems to go in spurts, don't know if they get paid for the downtime). At the end of that 6 years, construction moves on. Money goes to another state, or another part of the state outside of a commute. What do you do then? If properly constructed, that 6 year road project won't need more than minor maintenance for years. Sure 6-ish guys keep a job in the area, but the several hundred lose theirs. This pattern of popup work repeats across the country. Federal expansion programs are not sustainable. They can help, but ultimately you need the private sector to create jobs by selling goods and services.

0xcde4c3db 10y ago

Gottschalk uses a term I'm unfamiliar with: "race liberals". Does anyone know what the definition or typical usage pattern of this term is? Is it specific to some particular academic field or political clique? I'm not finding very good examples with Google (which thinks that "race, liberals" and "race. Liberals" are good matches).

richmarr 10y ago
> "...race liberals ran roughshod over deep concerns expressed by other liberals and some experts on crime and punishment that the quest for more proceduralism untethered to substantive goals in criminal justice would yield a more punitive criminal justice system" Outside the actual meaning intended for 'race liberals' it does seem like a case of labelling with the intent to paint a non-neutral narrative. The 'race liberals' ran roughshod. The other liberals concerns were deep, and supported by experts, and the proceduralism was apparently not tethered to any goals. This paragraph at least seems more fiction than non-fiction.
- Tloewald 10y ago
  The sentence is a little tough to unpack but it's saying that emphasizing procedure (rules) with a focus on race rather than improving criminal justice more broadly could yield a more punitive system. It's describing a difference of opinion, and this opinion seems reasonable. I assume a "race liberal" is someone who is liberal with respect to race just as a "social conservative" might be pro union and pro welfare but anti gay and anti abortion.
  - richmarr 10y ago
    > ...emphasizing procedure (rules) with a focus on race rather than improving criminal justice more broadly could yield a more punitive system... I assume a "race liberal" ... I'm not aware anyone in this thread is having difficulty 'unpacking' the sentence, or extrapolating the broad meaning of the term 'race liberal'. If you read the parent's comment in a more generous frame of mind you'll realise that they were probably interested in exactly how this term has been applied in the past. My own comment was regarding the way the author presented a narrative, using labels without describing who she was actually talking about, criticising their actions without describing what they actually did. This narrative proclaims that a group did something without evidence or even goals, against the deep wishes of others, including experts. Does it seem likely that they didn't have goals (after all the qualifier 'substantive' is deeply subjective)? Does it seem likely that all the experts were opposed? Does it seem likely that only the opposing side had deep concerns?

logfromblammo 10y ago

Being a prosecutor and having compassion are largely incompatible. If you can't smother that part of yourself, you get fed up with putting people in prison--essentially for being poor--and quit in disgust. That creates a vicious cycle, wherein the cruelty of disproportionately severe prosecutions drives out those who would not pursue them. When the people with the most convictions and longest sentences for the worst offenses get promoted, whether the criminals deserved them or not, it affects the workplace culture. Perhaps it would be better to force the state's criminal-court attorneys to spend equal time as prosecutors and as public defenders, and promote based on criteria other than win-loss ratio.

Zigurd 10y ago
Being a prosecutor is also a stepping stone for politicians. Which makes selecting for smart ambitious cruel assholes even worse.
EdHominem 10y ago
> Perhaps it would be better to force the state's criminal-court attorneys to spend equal time as prosecutors and as public defenders That's a brilliant idea. What better way to find systematic holes in the system than by making the same people fight against them half the time, and making their reviews based on an equal amount of prosecution and defense? Even if we still just went by the numbers (which we would, it's easy) at least it wouldn't be so one-sided.