We tend to address the explosion in prison population as a direct result of the War on Drugs, and it's a foundational argument to end the war. Pfaff raises some issues:
Today, the US is home to about 5% of the world’s prisoners population, but nearly 25% of its prisoners. Our prison-and-jail incarceration rate* of 756 (in 2011) is the highest in the world. The countries filling out the top ten (in descending order) are Russia, Cuba, Belarus, Belize, Georgia (the country—the state has a higher rate), Kazakhstan, Suriname, South Africa, Botswana, Israel, Ukraine, and Chile; Russia’s rate of 629** putting it in the number 2 slot.There are some gaps in the reasoning, such as the contention that drug addicts, in order to feed their habits, engage in property crime to get the money for drugs. There are drug dealers fighting over turf, which produces violent crime. In other words, drug crime isn't limited to the possession or sale of narcotics, but all the ancillary conduct that flows from it, and a million drug addicts can do an awful lot of damage.
Like all zombie ideas, the claim linking the War on Drugs to this explosion has some facial plausibility. The surge in incarceration and the War on Drugs started around the same time (if you use the Reagan Administration, not the Nixon one, as the starting point for the War on Drugs). And between 1980 and 2009, the number of prisoners incarcerated on drug offenses rose by approximately 1,175%!But like with all zombies, cracks in the argument become quickly apparent. Take the 1,175% number. In 1980, there were 19,000 drug inmates in state prison, a number which soared to 242,200 in 2009. And yes, that means there are more people in prison today for drug crimes than were in prison in 1972 for all crimes (around 200,000).
But in 2009, there were over 1.36 million people in state prison. And 242,200 is only 17.7% of 1.36M. So a lot of non-drug offenders were added to prison during those years, too—a lot more, in fact, than drug offenders.
While the stats don't make all the distinctions that one might want, and may well leave open the question of whether drugs, and the War on Drugs, plays a larger role than the statistics show, the point remains that our outrageous prison population cannot be explained, not by a long shot, as a by-product of drugs.
The other explanation, of course, is that it is a by-product of our embrace of "tough on crime" politics, where no sentence is long enough, no crime punished harshly enough, so satisfy the public or quell politicians cries for more crimes and longer sentences.
Consider the following thought experiment. What would US prison populations in 2009 look like if in 1980 we released all 23,900 prisoners serving time for drug offenses (the 19,000 state prisoners plus 4,900 federal drug inmates) and proceeded to admit no prisoners for drug crimes in the subsequent years? Instead of rising 3.8-fold, it would have risen 3-fold. A difference, but not an enormous one.My pal Gideon has been doing yeoman's work pounding home the point that there, in a prison cell, but for the grace of God, go each of us. We are them. We are one bad turn, one mistake, one falsely accused mistake, away from becoming one of these statistics.
But then, until it touches our lives, the Aaron Swartz phenomenon to use a recent example, people neither know nor care. And even when someone we know and care about falls into the clutches of the monster we've created, myopia prevents us from recognizing that it's not a fluke, attributable to one especially over-zealous prosecutor or one particularly vague law.
While the Swartz case, and his suicide, might have served to enlighten a generation of geeks as to a legal system that has been locking people away for absurdly long periods, it instead devolved to a misguided fantasy where the system was generally fine, but in that one instance went bad. Instead of enlightening, the efforts of well-intended by ignorant people diverted attention from the real problems.
It was a terrible shame that the opportunity to make a substantial segment of the population more knowledgeable was lost. And make no mistake, it was lost. The discussion surrounding the Swartz suicide was grossly misguided and clearly wrong, and yet those who cared about Swartz suffered a devastating bout of Dunning-Kruger Syndrome.
For the most part, the only instances of crime-related information that is widely disseminated is the stuff that makes our blood boil, that makes us want to increase sentences, impose life plus cancer, hate the criminal and demand that more be done. Every dead child breeds a call for a new crime. Every tragedy turns into a marketing opportunity to fill prison cells, because the prisons aren't full enough.
And as much as those of us concerned with, and knowledgeable about, the system know how misguided this is, we must stop denying that majority of Americans don't applaud these measures. How many more politicians will glide to office on promises of life in prison for jaywalkers?
As marijuana laws change, and they clearly appear to be changing, this graph suggests that it won't change America from being the world's foremost jailor. Sure, ending the War on Drugs matters and will help, but it won't solve the problem. Until we stop sentencing people to 10 years where one will do, it won't stop. And until people stop calling for blood every time a new story of crime or tragedy appears in the media, it won't stop. And because no one else see it, or gives a damn, it's left to use to keep pounding this message home.
It may not work? Very true. But giving up and watching silently as Prison Nation persists is not an option.
© 2012 Simple Justice NY LLC. This feed is for personal, non-commercial & Newstex use only. The use of this feed on any other website is a copyright violation. If this feed is not via RSS reader or Newstex, it infringes the copyright.
Source: http://blog.simplejustice.us/2013/04/25/prison-nation-assume-nothing.aspx?ref=rss
download power of attorney dui attorney dui lawyer dumb laws
No comments:
Post a Comment