Amid the prison reform debate and concerns about prison over-crowding is an understanding of the role that the war on drugs has played in creating the prison issue.
In this article we will examine the conservative case for ending the war on drugs, the fear tactics and why they don’t make sense, and the cost-benefit analysis of the criminal justice system.
A year ago this month, the Nation Review published an article entitled “The Tea Party and the Drug War.” In it, they argued that “If the tea-party believes in its principles, it must choose the libertarian path on drug prohibition.”
Jeffrey Miron, a senior lecturer and director of undergraduate studies at Harvard University and senior fellow at the Cato Institute writes, “Fiscal responsibility means limiting government expenditures to programs that can be convincingly said to generate benefits in excess of their costs.”
They add, “This does not rule out programs with large expenditures, or ones whose benefits are difficult to quantify; national defense is guilty on both counts, yet few believe that substantial military expenditure is necessarily irresponsible.”
However, “Any significant expenditure, however, should come with a credible claim that it produces a benefit large enough to outweigh both the expenditure itself and any ancillary costs.”
The key point is, he argues, that drug prohibition is not fiscally responsible. He cites an annual cost of $70 billion per year (which seems frankly extremely low, when you figure in costs to the courts, to incarceration, to rehab and interdiction efforts), and yet “no evidence suggests that prohibition reduces drug use to a significant degree.”
In fact, he argues, “Prohibition has unintended consequences that push its cost-benefit ratio even farther in the wrong direction. Prohibition generates violence and corruption by pushing drug markets underground and inflating prices. Prohibition inhibits quality control, so users suffer accidental poisoning and overdoses. Prohibition destroys civil liberties, inhibits legitimate medical uses of targeted drugs, and wreaks havoc in drug-producing countries.”
“Drug prohibition, at least when imposed at the federal level, is also hard to reconcile with constitutionally limited government,” the article adds.
Finally he concludes, “Finally, drug prohibition is hopelessly inconsistent with allegiance to free markets, regardless of the level of government.” He adds, “Free markets should mean both that businesses can operate as they please and that individuals can purchase and consume whatever they want, so long as these actions do not harm others, even when such decisions seem unwise. Drug prohibition interferes with precisely these activities.”
The bottom line, I think, is the cost combined with the lack of evidence that such efforts work, along with the collateral impact.
Fear Tactics Lose Sight of Facts
The fear of a prison release does not make a lot of sense. As Michelle Alexander and Ruth Wilson Gilmore write, “Nearly everyone sentenced to prison leaves. The average California prison term is about 54 months; time served in jail awaiting trial makes the typical period in state custody about 43 months.”
A prison release may release people early, but they would have been released anyway.
They thus argue, “What’s been ballyhooed as ‘early release’ is actually a weak tweak in a system that’s spiraled out of control because Democrats and Republicans have marched to a ‘get tough’ beat that has little to do with preventing crime or addressing its community consequences. Poor people – a majority of whom are people of color – have become locked up, locked out, demonized and disposable. Once released, they are legally discriminated against for the rest of their lives in employment, housing and public benefits. They are relegated to permanent, second-class status.”
To me this demonstrates we need to revamp the system. What we are doing is not working. Last night on a police ridealong the officer I rode with arrested a man, just released from prison two days before, for violating parole.
He was quite clearly high as a kite. Last night he was back in custody, on the public’s dime. At some point he is likely not to go back to prison but rather to attempt some type of drug treatment.
Does this help us? Why not keep the people out of prisons where the costs are enormous and put them into long-term treatment. This particular individual is on anti-psychotic medication as well, meaning he would probably be better served getting long-term care than bouncing around from prison to jail to treatment center.
Some argue that costs preclude this, but this is just an excuse. Transferring money from the cost of incarceration and the court costs to long-term treatment, mental health and job training would be far cheaper and likely far more effective.
Cost-Benefit Analysis
Reason Magazine, in their July 2011 issue already online, writes, “At the first presidential debate of the 2012 campaign, former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson implored Republican voters to conduct a ‘cost-benefit analysis’ of the criminal justice system.”
“Half of what we spend on law enforcement, the courts, and the prisons is drug-related, and to what end?” Johnson asked a South Carolina audience in May. “We’re arresting 1.8 million a year in this country; we now have 2.3 million people behind bars in this country. We have the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world. I would ask people to look at this issue; see if they don’t come to the same conclusion that I did, and that is that 90 percent of the drug problem is prohibition-related.”
The article points out: “America has one-quarter of the world’s prisoners. More than 7 million people are under correctional supervision in this country. These staggering statistics—no other country comes close in percentage terms, let alone raw numbers—have serious consequences. For one thing, there is the fiscal cost: The corrections system lags only Medicaid in government spending growth on the state level. Yet most prisons are overcrowded, underserviced, and exponentially more dangerous than any decent society should tolerate.”
They then add: “Very few in our political and media classes are familiar with the communities most ravaged by crime and punishment. No politician ever lost an election by alienating the ex-con vote (in no small part because in a dozen states, ex-felons who have completed parole are still permanently barred from voting).”
They focus their analysis on the drug war, which they call “a leading supplier to the prison industry and the biggest inspiration for new ways to circumvent the Fourth Amendment. More than 800,000 people are still arrested each year for marijuana alone, despite the widespread misconception that pot has been largely decriminalized, and despite the fact that close to half of all Americans by now have smoked it, and more than half, by some surveys, favor legalizing it.”
But government is running out of money and it is time to look at a cost-benefit analysis of drug prohibition.
“Yet we can’t assess the corrosive and life-destroying faults of the criminal justice system—and our complicity in creating them—merely by looking at the bottom line of a spreadsheet,” they write. “Americans have created a system in which criminals who have served their sentences can still expect to remain incarcerated for life. Voters continue to reward prosecutors who are notorious for locking up innocent people.”
The article continues, “I’m grateful that Gary Johnson wasn’t the only libertarian-leaning candidate at the first GOP debate in South Carolina. Before the former New Mexico governor gave his hardheaded consequentialist answer to the drug war question, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), who has always been more interested in principle than pragmatism, gave perhaps the most unusual answer in presidential campaign history.”
He continues, “When asked about legalizing heroin, Paul analogized personal drug use to freedom of religion. When the stunned panelist asked him whether he had indeed just cited heroin use as an example of liberty, Paul said yes.”
“What you’re inferring is that if we legalize heroin tomorrow everybody would use heroin,” Paul said. “How many people would use heroin if it’s legal? I bet nobody here would use heroin or say, ‘Oh yeah, I want heroin, I need the government to protect me, so I need these laws.’ “
Unfortunately, Reason does not perform a cost-benefit analysis of its own and it is very difficult to assess their claims other than evaluate them rhetorically.
Some have argued that, without the stick of jail sentences hanging over people’s heads, there would be no incentive to get clean. They may be correct.
On the other hand, prison is an extremely expensive stick. They are not getting clean in very large numbers anyway. And there is no evidence that the drug policies are working.
From an empirical standpoint, it is difficult to analyze existing data because any small pocket of legalization in an oasis of prohibition tends to create a magnet effect, drawing in people from afar prone to use and abuse drugs.
One thing that is clear, we can no longer afford current policies.
—David M. Greenwald reporting
I wonder how much the right actually subscribes to the high ideals that Miron touts, “Fiscal responsibility means limiting government expenditures to programs that can be convincingly said to generate benefits in excess of their costs.” Rather, it could be that the right sees a large prison population as a way to divert public revenues from programs that would empower the middle class, such as education. Big prison populations are a means of “starving the beast” and diminishing middle class power.
[quote]”Free markets should mean both that businesses can operate as they please and that individuals can purchase and consume whatever they want, so long as these actions do not harm others, even when such decisions seem unwise. Drug prohibition interferes with precisely these activities.”
[/quote]
But drug use does harm others. Many commit crimes while high; drive while high, etc. Kids die taking drugs/sniffing glue. So to say no one is harmed by people who use drugs, be it hard drugs or alcohol, is fallacious.
[quote]Some argue that costs preclude this, but this is just an excuse. Transferring money from the cost of incarceration and the court costs to long-term treatment, mental health and job training would be far cheaper and likely far more effective.
[/quote]
You don’t know that it would be cheaper… more humane, but not necessarily cheaper…
[quote]”Yet we can’t assess the corrosive and life-destroying faults of the criminal justice system—and our complicity in creating them—merely by looking at the bottom line of a spreadsheet,” [/quote]
This is essentially an admission that the cost of all the services to keep these people out of jail would be more expensive than the cost of incarceration…
[quote]How many people would use heroin if it’s legal? I bet nobody here would use heroin or say, ‘Oh yeah, I want heroin, I need the government to protect me, so I need these laws.’ “
[/quote]
This is the most ridiculous argument I ever heard…
What we need is a new pardigm on the use of drugs. More youth programs to prevent kids from ever getting started on the stuff…
How do we accomplish more youth programs to prevent kids from ever getting started? Government (schools, advertising, etc.) or ?
Recently I saw on TV where Portugal no longer sends their citizens to prison for drug charges. Instead they put them in rehab programs and their arrests have dropped tremendously. Makes sense to me.
An excellent article by former president Jimmy Carter was published yesterday by the New York Times on the 40th anniversary of our country’s drug war.
[b]Call Off the Global Drug War[/b]
By JIMMY CARTER
Published: June 16, 2011
“IN an extraordinary new initiative announced earlier this month, the Global Commission on Drug Policy has made some courageous and profoundly important recommendations in a report on how to bring more effective control over the illicit drug trade. The commission includes the former presidents or prime ministers of five countries, a former secretary general of the United Nations, human rights leaders, and business and government leaders, including Richard Branson, George P. Shultz and Paul A. Volcker.
The report describes the total failure of the present global antidrug effort, and in particular America’s “war on drugs,” which was declared 40 years ago today. It notes that the global consumption of opiates has increased 34.5 percent, cocaine 27 percent and cannabis 8.5 percent from 1998 to 2008. Its primary recommendations are to substitute treatment for imprisonment for people who use drugs but do no harm to others, and to concentrate more coordinated international effort on combating violent criminal organizations rather than nonviolent, low-level offenders.
These recommendations are compatible with United States drug policy from three decades ago. In a message to Congress in 1977, I said the country should decriminalize the possession of less than an ounce of marijuana, with a full program of treatment for addicts. I also cautioned against filling our prisons with young people who were no threat to society, and summarized by saying: “Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself.”
These ideas were widely accepted at the time. But in the 1980s President Ronald Reagan and Congress began to shift from balanced drug policies, including the treatment and rehabilitation of addicts, toward futile efforts to control drug imports from foreign countries.
This approach entailed an enormous expenditure of resources and the dependence on police and military forces to reduce the foreign cultivation of marijuana, coca and opium poppy and the production of cocaine and heroin. One result has been a terrible escalation in drug-related violence, corruption and gross violations of human rights in a growing number of Latin American countries.
The commission’s facts and arguments are persuasive. It recommends that governments be encouraged to experiment “with models of legal regulation of drugs … that are designed to undermine the power of organized crime and safeguard the health and security of their citizens.” For effective examples, they can look to policies that have shown promising results in Europe, Australia and other places.
But they probably won’t turn to the United States for advice. Drug policies here are more punitive and counterproductive than in other democracies, and have brought about an explosion in prison populations. At the end of 1980, just before I left office, 500,000 people were incarcerated in America; at the end of 2009 the number was nearly 2.3 million. There are 743 people in prison for every 100,000 Americans, a higher portion than in any other country and seven times as great as in Europe. Some 7.2 million people are either in prison or on probation or parole — more than 3 percent of all American adults!
Some of this increase has been caused by mandatory minimum sentencing and “three strikes you’re out” laws. But about three-quarters of new admissions to state prisons are for nonviolent crimes. And the single greatest cause of prison population growth has been the war on drugs, with the number of people incarcerated for nonviolent drug offenses increasing more than twelvefold since 1980.
Continuing….[b]Call Off the Global Drug War[/b] by Jimmy Carter
Not only has this excessive punishment destroyed the lives of millions of young people and their families (disproportionately minorities), but it is wreaking havoc on state and local budgets. Former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger pointed out that, in 1980, 10 percent of his state’s budget went to higher education and 3 percent to prisons; in 2010, almost 11 percent went to prisons and only 7.5 percent to higher education.
Maybe the increased tax burden on wealthy citizens necessary to pay for the war on drugs will help to bring about a reform of America’s drug policies. At least the recommendations of the Global Commission will give some cover to political leaders who wish to do what is right.
A few years ago I worked side by side for four months with a group of prison inmates, who were learning the building trade, to renovate some public buildings in my hometown of Plains, Ga. They were intelligent and dedicated young men, each preparing for a productive life after the completion of his sentence. More than half of them were in prison for drug-related crimes, and would have been better off in college or trade school.
To help such men remain valuable members of society, and to make drug policies more humane and more effective, the American government should support and enact the reforms laid out by the Global Commission on Drug Policy.”
[i]Jimmy Carter, the 39th president, is the founder of the Carter Center and the winner of the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize.[/i]
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on June 17, 2011, on page A35 of the New York edition with the headline: Call Off the Global Drug War
I was for de-criminalization until I read this from Jimmy Carter. Now I have to question it.
Ditto. Not sure that citing Carter is ever persuasive on any topic.
“But drug use does harm others. Many commit crimes while high; drive while high, etc. Kids die taking drugs/sniffing glue. So to say no one is harmed by people who use drugs, be it hard drugs or alcohol, is fallacious.”
Most collateral crime that occurs associated with drug use is not crime that occurs while a person is high, but rather is crime associated with the illegal acquisition of the drugs.
You have the other problem which is that a lot of crime occurs around the use of alcohol and yet we decided at one point that the harm of making it illegal outweighed the harm of its use.
Would quoting W. F.Buckley to the same end engage our Davis right wing in this conversation?
http://old.nationalreview.com/12feb96/drug.html
[quote]How do we accomplish more youth programs to prevent kids from ever getting started? Government (schools, advertising, etc.) or ?[/quote]
Institute school/after school programs that are so much fun, kids would rather go to them than get into trouble. With all the enticing new technology out there, I cannot believe we cannot come up with very innovative educational programs that would keep kids so busy and intrigued, they wouldn’t feel the need for some other kind of high involving drugs.
[quote]…concentrate more coordinated international effort on combating violent criminal organizations rather than nonviolent, low-level offenders. [/quote]
This just shows you how clueless Carter is. The gov’t attempted to remove organized crime from the NY City docks some years ago, bc there were so many murders. It was an abysmal failure, and didn’t make a dent. You need to dry up the source – our youth getting high on drugs. Discourage young people from even starting on the path of drug use would be far more efficacious than trying to remove violent criminal organizations from the drug trade.
[i]”Would quoting W. F.Buckley to the same end engage our Davis right wing in this conversation?”[/i]
There are quite a few conservatives onboard the ideas to decriminalize some drugs. Yes, I think conservatives have more credibility here given they are prone to be harder on crime. I don’t think Jimmy Carter is credible on this… in fact I don’t think he is completely lucid much of the time.
This is a difficult social problem. I think we have more than enough proof that the old way is not working. It is time to try something different. I don’t think the new way will be a panacea by any stretch of the imagination. However, I think we can do much better… damaging the lives of fewer people at a much lower dollar cost.
Frankly, I do not care too much that adults will binge on legal drugs. Many already do today, and it is too costly to try to prevent adults from their own self-destructive behavior. I think most of our resources need to go to education, law enforcement and protection for kids. I think too we need new push to do the same for alcohol. For example, I would be in favor of stricter regulations preventing advertisers from targeting kids. When it comes to the freedom for companies to make a profit, I draw the line at ages 20 and below. I would still want very harsh penalties for any adult providing drugs to kids.
JB
I agree with your position on focusing on prevention of youth drug use as the best means to lower rates of drug use overall.
What is interesting to me is that you seem to judge an idea more by it’s source than by it’s merit. I see this attitude as a major hindrance to finding any common ground and making progress. Surely an idea should be considered on the basis of it’s strenghths and weaknesses rather than the personality or political philosophy of those who favor or oppose it.
[i]”What is interesting to me is that you seem to judge an idea more by it’s source than by it’s merit.”[/i]
Medwoman: I try to judge ideas that have merit based on their measurable merit. Otherwise I judge untested ideas for social change from a basis of my own life experience and perspective. I think most of the people that blog on this site do the same. One difference regardless of merit is value… two people can value things differently, hence measure merit differently. For example, a person having a family member or friend that would have likely died of a drug overdose might assess greater value to the benefits of tough drug law enforcement.
I have been a past supporter of tough drug laws, enforcement and penalties; but based on their merit, these things are not working. I now believe we need to change our approach. However, there are a lot of people that are not ready to give up on the old tough approach. My point about Carter versus Buckley was that Carter is less likely to sway the opinion of people reluctant to give up the old approach; whereas Buckley would likely have more credibility with them. Also, Carter more recently has done and said things that have made many people question his credibility on a number of things. I think Jimmy Carter is a moral and caring man, but he was a terrible president and an even worse ex-president… I would prefer he says out of the debate on this topic for the sake of the topic.
[i]”Institute school/after school programs that are so much fun, kids would rather go to them than get into trouble. With all the enticing new technology out there, I cannot believe we cannot come up with very innovative educational programs that would keep kids so busy and intrigued; they wouldn’t feel the need for some other kind of high involving drugs.”[/i]
Elaine, I agree 100%. But why not make the “during school” programs so much fun and intriguing that kids will stay? Crappy schools contribute to the drug problem in a big way.
[quote]Elaine, I agree 100%. But why not make the “during school” programs so much fun and intriguing that kids will stay? Crappy schools contribute to the drug problem in a big way.[/quote]
Amen!