Jail and Prison Population at an All-Time High

I apologize. I read this:

And thought that your comment about a "utopia" was sarcastic. In addition, I (for some reason) thought that you have argued against regulation in the past.

My bad.

 

I know it doesn't directly relate to jail population, but I have been asked to minimize drug-related threads, so here we go!

http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/341/troopers.shtml

Newsbrief: Pennsylvania Troopers Find Dope Most Often on White Motorists but Search More Blacks and Hispanics, Study Finds 6/11/04
A year-long study of racial profiling practices in the Pennsylvania State Police (PSP) has found little evidence to show that state troopers stop minority motorists in disproportionate numbers, but has found that troopers are more likely to search them even though white motorists are more likely to be carrying contraband. The study was conducted by researchers at the University of Cincinnati and Penn State University for the PSP, in response to public and political pressure to examine whether state troopers are engaging in racially discriminatory police practices.

The PSP is, naturally, trumpeting the study's finding that "no consistent evidence exists to suggest that Pennsylvania State Troopers make stopping decisions based on drivers' race or ethnicity." In a press release late last month, State Police Commissioner Jeffrey Miller noted that the PSP had commissioned the study as part of a policy prohibiting bias-based policing. "I'm pleased that the results clearly show that our troopers are not stopping drivers based on their race."

But apparent bias does show up in "post-stop outcomes," where "it appears there are racial, ethnic and gender disparities, particularly for arrest and search decisions," the study's authors reported. The study found that blacks were 1.5 times more likely to be arrested and 3.0 times more likely to be searched than whites. For Hispanics, those figures were 1.8 and 2.7 respectively.

The difference between the post-stop arrest and search figures for each ethnic group is attributable to the study's finding that while minorities are more likely to be searched during a traffic stop, they are less likely to be carrying contraband than whites. PSP officers found contraband in 29% of searches of whites, compared to 21% for blacks, 17% for Hispanics and 12% for "other."

Revealingly, searches conducted at the trooper's discretion – as opposed to those mandated by departmental policy – show an even greater discrepancy in search success rates and a higher percentage of searches conducted that found nothing. For these types of hunch-based searches, PSP officers found contraband in 17% of searches of whites, compared to 11% for blacks, 9% for Hispanics and 7% for "other."

"Differential searches and success rates of minority drivers appears to be an issue of department-wide concern," the study's authors noted.

And by the way, when it comes to "contraband" seized by the PCP, 51% was drugs, 18% was alcohol, then came cash and cars. Weapons were seized in only 5.5% of the successful searches. And in fully half of all vehicle searches, the only reason for searching the vehicle was the driver's consent.

Read the study, "Project on Police-Citizen Contacts, Year I Report," online at:
http://www.psp.state.pa.us/psp/lib/psp/pdf/psp_police_citizens_contact_final_report_2002-2003.pdf

 

I posted the link to the complete report online. Feel free to dig into the minutae.

 

Sorry. I agree that it would be interesting data to have. Yet one more reason to regulate drug sales. We will be able to study the issue accurately and with real world numbers instead of WAGs.

 

...and Sensenbrenner just wants to increase the prison population. How long is it going to take before these morons realize that we are not going to incarcerate ourselves out of the drug problem?


Newsbrief: Bill Introduced in Congress Would Mandate Ten Years to Life for Some mar1juana Sales 7/2/04

Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, introduced a bill June 14 that would radically increase mandatory minimum prison sentences for anyone furnishing any controlled substance, including mar1juana, to a minor or to anyone who has been in drug treatment before. It would also create mandatory minimum life sentences for a second offense, as well as creating mandatory minimum sentences for furnishing drugs in a designated "drug-free zone."

Under current federal law, distribution to a minor carries a one-year mandatory minimum sentence; Sensenbrenner's bill would raise that to 10 years. Similarly, drug sales within a "drug-free zone" currently nets a mandatory minimum one-year sentence; Sensenbrenner's bill would raise that to five years. It also expands the definition of "drug-free zones" from schools, college campuses, and video arcade facilities (!?) to include "public library, or public or private daycare facility," and drug treatment facilities.

The bill would also order the US Sentencing Commission to make appropriate adjustments in its sentencing guidelines. Telling the Sentencing Commission and federal judges what to do is familiar business for Rep. Sensenbrenner, who helped ensure the passage last year of the much-criticized Feeney Amendment, which restricts federal judges' ability to grant downward departures from the harsh federal sentencing guidelines.

But, hey, don't say Sensenbrenner lacks compassion. The bill also includes relief for snitches or, in Sensenbrenner's language, a provision "assuring limitation on applicability of statutory minimums to persons who have done everything they can to assist the government."

The bill, which is euphemistically titled "Defending America's Most Vulnerable: Safe Access to Drug Treatment and Child Protection Act of 2004" (H.R. 4547), so far has no cosponsors. To read the bill online, go to http://www.thomas.loc.gov and type in "H.R. 4547" in the search box. Visit http://www.famm.org/si_federal_sentencing_sensenbrenner_06_29_04.htm for an analysis by Families Against Mandatory Minimums.

http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/344/senseless.shtml

 

We have been enacting stricter and stricter rules over the past century with absolutely ZERO progress, unless you want to call more availability, lower prices, and higher purity progress. Other progress made includes:

80% of high school students since the 1970s report it is "easy" or "very easy" to obtain mar1juana.

Anti-drug ads increasing the likelihood of teenage experimentation.

2.1 MILLION prisoners behind bars (as opposed to a half million in 1980).

Half of our young people since 1972 report that they have used an illegal drug before they leave high school.

A nearly exponential increase in anti-drug expenditures with zero reduction in overall usage rates.


Sane,
I would ask you to look at the data regarding drug use and abuse in this country and others before emotionally saying that we need even STRICTER rules.

Over the last calendar year, Thailand executed thousands of suspected "drug dealers" without a trial and yet drug abuse is still rampant in their country. Would you advocate for the police to be able to simply off the suspected drug dealers in the name of "stricter" laws?

Compare that to Holland, where mar1juana is tolerated. Adult usage of mar1juana is very comparable to what we see here in the states whereas use by minors is HALF what we see here. Which policy is more effective?

 

This has been the entire focus of the drug war since Nixon coined the term in 1972. We have enacted stricter and stricter laws since then, including mandatory minimum sentences in the '80s (which have proven to be no deterrant), capital punishment for drug lords (again, no deterrant factor), and "zero tolerance" in schools and workplaces, to no avail.

The fundamental flaw in prohibition is the law of economics. If there is demand for a product, SOMEONE will step up to supply that product no matter the risk or consequence, particularly when people are willing to pay exorbitant prices for said product. The only way we will reduce real drug usage rates is over the course of a couple of decades of education, education that can be most effectively delivered in a regulated market.

The only way to "wipe out the black market" is to regulate distribution and sales in order to ensure that the people who find it most difficult to get these drugs are our children. As it is, kids report that it is easier to get illegal drugs than alcohol. Half of our young people use illegal drugs before they leave high school, as opposed to Holland, where rates of drug use by minors is roughly half what we have here.

I would appreciate being pointed to any article anywhere that says that Thailand's drug usage rates have gone down. Everything I have seen points to flat drug use rates throughout the killing spree their government has been on.

Besides, as I have pointed out, we haven't seen positive results despite over three DECADES of increased drug war hysteria. You say we will see results after a few years, but we have been doing the same thing year after year while kids report illegal drugs "easy" or "very easy" to acquire, prices have gone down, and purity has increased. The only impact prohibition has had on our society is negative and I would challenge you to name even a single positive impact this policy has had on our country.

You are right that nothing good happens with these drugs unless taken in controlled amounts, but what you fail to grasp is that the VAST majority of drug users are responsible, go to work every day, pay their taxes, raise their kids, and are persecuted because of their choice of intoxicants. A VERY small percentage of people have problems with certain chemicals (mostly heroin and cocaine) and do not have the ability to control their usage of them. However, I would contend that a system based on healthcare and education would be FAR more effective at 1) steering people away from the more dangerous drugs and 2) identifying patterns of abuse and targeting treatment options at the abusers.

As far as "the right controls," I believe the only way to control these drugs effectively is to make legitimate businesspeople and the government responsible for the manufacture, distribution, and sales. If you think the current system does ANYTHING to control drugs, then you have not researched the issue. If a 12 year old (or younger) can aquire an illegal drug (and it happens every day), then we are not effectively controlling the distribution.

Actually, their overall drug usage rates are very comparable to what we have here in the US (http://bbs2.clutchfans.net/showthread.php?s=&threadid=77244). The telling tale is in usage by minors, which stands at about half what we see here. Despite having a system of decriminalized, tolerated mar1juana use, their young people do not use it at anywhere near the rates that our young people do. The last interview I saw with the official in charge of drug policy in Holland attributed that to the removal of the "forbidden fruit" aspect that causes so many young people in the US to try illegal drugs.

I don't either. I would push for a much more comprehensive and controlled system as I described in this thread (http://bbs2.clutchfans.net/showthread.php?s=&threadid=63243). I look at the Dutch as one of the few examples of "tolerated" drug use. They don't have even close to the kind of control over these drugs that I would be looking for and their system doesn't have any educational or healthcare components, two places that my plan focuses on.

I know you don't believe yourself to be an expert in this field, but I would challenge you to learn more. Read all you can about drug use and abuse, particulary scientific studies (all studies since the 1890s have found that criminalizing drugs will cause more problems than it will solve). I have confidence that when you study the issue, you will come to the same conclusion I have: prohibition causes FAR more harm than drugs ever have or ever could.

 

And yet it has made absolutely ZERO difference in drug usage rates, adult or underage.

Half a million people are in jail for nonviolent drug offenses, leaving 1.6 million in jail for other things. Perhaps the increase in the prison population has had a positive impact on crime rates, but the data is also clearly showing that increases in enforcement of and incarceration for drug offenses does absolutely NOTHING to affect drug usage rates.

I am arguing against prohibition in part because I want to move the police back into a position where they are trusted by 99% of the populace. This could easily be accomplished by ditching the drug war and reassigning those officers to places where they CAN have a positive effect on crime rates. Imagine how many REAL criminals we could catch if the police were not tilting at the windmills that the politicians have set them against.

The 1.6 million who are in jail for crimes other than nonviolent drug offenses certainly deserve to be there. I would even be OK with a 2.1 million population if all of those people were in jail for something other than a drug "crime." Personally, I would rather that the police have the resources to go after credit card theives and robbery suspects than have them bogged down prosecuting a series of laws that has no positive impact on our society.

 

An All-Time High: Nearly 7 Million Behind Bars or on Probation or Parole 7/30/04
In its latest annual report on the US "correctional population," the number of people under the control of the criminal justice system, the Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) has found that almost 6.9 million Americans are in jail or prison or on probation or parole as of December 31, 2003. That number marks an increase of 130,700 from the previous year and represents 3.2% of the adult population of the US. In other words, one out of every 32 adults in the US is under some form of correctional supervision.

Some 691,000 people were in city or county jails, while nearly 1.4 million were in state or federal prisons, making a total of 2,078,570 people behind bars in the US, also an all-time high. Those figures represent a 3.9% increase in the jail population and a 2.3% increase in the prison population. Nearly half a million, or almost one-quarter, of these prisoners are doing time for drug crimes, according to earlier BJS reports.

In addition to the nearly 2.1 million prisoners, BJS found that slightly more than four million people were on probation and nearly 775,000 on parole. The number of probationers increased 1.2% over the previous year, while the number of parolees climbed by 3.1% Generally, parolees have served prison time and are on parole for further supervision, while probationers have been sentenced to criminal justice system supervision in lieu of a prison sentence.

The number of probationers increased by more than 49,000, 1.4% over the previous year but slightly less than half the annual average increase since 1995, BJS reported. Drug offenders constituted 25% of all probationers. The number of parolees increased by more than 24,000, an increase of 3.1% over 2002. And unlike the probation numbers, this year's rate of increase in parolees exceeds the average of 1.7% annually since 1995.

A staggering number of parolees are sent back to prison before finishing their supervision periods, BJS found. Of those people discharged from parole, 38% were sent back to prison, either for technical violations such as failing a drug test or missing an appointment, or for committing new crimes. Another 9% have simply vanished. But it is also worth noting that nearly half of all parolees completed their supervisory periods without committing a new crime or violating the terms of parole.

The continuing growth in the correctional population comes despite a decade of lower crime rates and the introduction of sentencing reforms in a number of states. Sentencing experts point to a number of factors in explaining the apparent contradiction.

"What we are seeing here is the long-term effect of longer sentences," said Marc Mauer, assistant director of the Sentencing Project (http://www.sentencingproject.org), a Washington, DC-based nonprofit which seeks alternatives to the heavy reliance on incarceration in the US. "Even though the number of people being convicted of crimes has not increased that much, the amount of time people are doing in prison has," he told DRCNet. "With policies like California's three-strikes law people are doing decades-long sentences. We recently did a report showing there are 127,000 people now serving life sentences (http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/338/life.shtml). While there have been some positive developments, such as the drug offender diversion initiatives, those have been offset by these punitive sentencing policies."

"There is no reason for this increase," said Eric Lotke, research director for the Justice Policy Institute (http://www.justicepolicy.org), another nonprofit dedicated to seeking more just alternatives to massive incarceration. "This is going along on auto-pilot, on bureaucratic inertia," he told DRCNet. "Until someone makes an effort to rein this in and says we need to restrain these costs and these intrusions on our civil liberties, it will be as it has been."

The Sentencing Project's Mauer also cited the impact of parole revocations. "The percentage of people returning to prison for parole violations has doubled in the last 20 years," he said. "Often that is a function of inadequate services for parolees. They are drug tested and get revoked if they're using drugs, even though there is insufficient drug treatment. Community-based supervision agencies don't have the resources to help these people, and that leads to high failure rates. It's a vicious cycle," he said.

"We are sending too many parolees back to prison," JPI's Lotke said flatly. "BJS does not disaggregate its statistics on this, but a large number of people are going back to prison for technical violation like a dirty drug test, not for committing new crimes. California especially is returning large numbers of people to prison on technical violations. And because it is California, if half of the parolees returning to prison are for technical violations, we're talking about thousands of people and millions of dollars."

Lotke agreed that parole services are inadequate. "You have to look at parole in two parts. The first is a discretionary decision: Should this person be released? The second part is to actually be on parole and out in the community," he said. "What has happened is that people have cut back on parole releases because they are politically unpopular, but at the same time, they unthinkingly cut back on supervision as well. We need supervision and we need more it," he said, "but with a different emphasis. We need good quality supervision trying to help people succeed as opposed to busting them when they fail."

The Sentencing Project's Mauer also pointed to continuing high arrest rates. "The crime is down, but arrest rates are not, especially with drugs, where the arrests are really more discretionary," he said. "It seems like an endless number of people are going to be arrested and incarcerated for drug offenses. There are some signs of change, but so far there is no letting up."

Mauer also suggested that the rise of drug courts and other diversion programs could be contributing to the numbers. "Some of these programs are diverting people from prison, and some are bringing people into the system who probably would not have been arrested if there was not a drug court option," he said, "so there is a net-widening effect."

Still, both Mauer and Lotke agreed that because of restrictions on people who can use the drug courts, their impact is limited. "The drug courts aren't handling major traffic," said Lotke. "The number of people going through drug courts is in the thousands or tens of thousands, while the number of drug arrests is more than a million each year."

Policy decisions, not crime rates, play a decisive role, said Lotke. BJS reported that two states, California and Texas, accounted for more than one million of the nearly five million on probation or parole, he noted. "Those numbers are too big," he said. "All you have to do is contrast California and Texas with New York, another large, urbanized state. If you look at the numbers, and especially the growth in recent year, it is much smaller in New York. It is not because there is less crime in New York, it is because of policy choices."

To read the report, "Probation and Parole in the United States, 2003" and associated documents, visit http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/abstract/ppus03.htm online.

http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/348/alltimehigh.shtml