How Many People Does the War on Drugs Put in Prison?

“weapon offense”

Offenses, of course. Curse the lack of edit functionality in this comment section.

[Fixed. Sadly, if we had an edit function, some people would abuse it ex post to curse more literally.–Econlib Ed.]

Quite a lot of drug incarceration happens when police know their neighborhoods and know who the bad kids are. They know the bad kids are committing property crimes and moving up to violent crimes, but they don’t have enough proof of serious property crimes to put them in jail yet, so the police frisk them regularly until they’re caught with some amphetamines or marijuana.

Then the police can put them in jail for drug crimes and the kids might get the idea from their parole officers eventually of getting a steady job and some discipline.

But the kids aren’t going to jail over the drugs; they’re going to jail for being bad kids and the drugs are just the easiest thing for the police to prove.

In the absence of drugs laws, they’d still need to go to jail but the police would have to spend days documenting some property crimes and minor assaults instead of just finding the pot in the kids’ pockets. Or the police might have to fabricate evidence to put the bad kids in jail.

So a lot of those drug prisoners were going to jail for something and it just turned out that the drugs were easiest to prosecute. If drugs were legal, those drug prisoners would still be in prison, but for something else.

Perhaps Brian and Roger are right, and these kids would still go to jail if they weren’t convicted of drug charges.

Or perhaps not. Maybe these kids would turn out better if we didn’t tell them that the justice system is fair, with a judge and/or jury deciding whether to convict based on a presumption of innocence, and then permit selective enforcement of drug laws that effectively allow the police to act as judge and jury, deciding on their own who to put in jail.

Lies have consequences. Generally not good ones.

I have to say I’m always a bit nervous at the idea of complete legalization. Unfettered by legal restrictions, I keep wondering what large scale industrial production techniques to lower costs along with modern advertising campaigns and pharmaceutical research to make it “safer” could do to consumption.

It would certainly be a grand experiment, and at least we know the very high costs of prohibition that legalization would be weighed against.

But I could imagine it going off the rails pretty badly. I could easily imagine opiates on the old being used as commonly as Ritalin on the young, for example.

In America today, what is not forbidden soon becomes a civil right that should be backed by federal enforcement. Soon after homosexuality was made legal by the Lawrence Supreme Court case came demands for homosexual marriage and for non-discrimination laws to cover homosexuals.

If we legalize marijuana, how soon will it be before employers, even private ones, are forbidden from testing applicants and employees for marijuana and other drugs?

One lonely data point.
A guy that I worked with killed a guy who sold him something other than crack cocaine (I do not remember what it was) for the real thing. He was wrong to give the guy the death penalty for running that scam on him and effectively stealing a little money from him, but he was basically a hard working decent person other than that. I doubt that he would have done any other crime had crack been legal.

Five years after the end of the War on Drugs, half of the prison-years handed out for non-robbery violent crime would be gone, along with 20% of the prison-years for robbery and property crimes, and 75% of the prison-years for weapons charges. That’s roughly half of all prison-years at the state level, and two-thirds of all prison-years at the federal level.

Got a better guess? Please share in the comments – and please show your work.

I don’t see any way that half of imprisonments for murder, manslaughter, rape/sexual assault, aggravated or simple assault, or “other violent crimes” would go away. That’s saying half of all those crimes are caused by drugs being illegal. Half of all rapes and sexual assaults are because drugs are illegal?

I can believe a greater-than-50-percent reduction in weapons charges, and a 20 percent reduction for robbery and property crimes.

Calculations: 12.7 percent…carry the 2…add swag factor = 17.3456% reduction in non-robbery violent crime. At most.

You are leaving out one critical variable even assuming all the areas you claim that might fall will.

I did not have time to look up the number, but well over half of all crimes are committed while under the influence of drugs or alcohol. People do stupid things when they are high or drunk.

If your argument as I read it, is to legalize all drugs include hard drugs like LSD, and Meth (which the stats you provide include these type of offensives), then you would also have to assume substance abuse would also increase. You would also have to conjurer that cases were one is moderately to seriously mentally inebriated would also rise, I would argue, quite sharply over the long term. This would be primarily be to a higher use rate from use of more extreme mind altering “hard” drugs.

Therefor, Domestic violence would absolutely go up.I would also expect rape, and DUI’s with their associated accidents and fatalities would also rise.

Therefor your argument’s merits have serious issues because you completely ignore the obvious crime rate increase that would happen in other crime stats.

“You’ve now created a class of millions of men that don’t have much capital, don’t have the connections to get a job, don’t have the temperament for formal education, and due to a criminal record have been banned from the vast majority of blue-collar work, itself a shrinking category.”

We need a zero or at least lower minimum wage, so that employers are more willing to take a chance on applicants with a criminal record. There should also be a safe harbor allowing employers to pay employees with criminal records a lower wage for some time (say one year) and to fire them without having to show just cause.

Bostonian: Good luck with that. It’s far too rational.

The vast majority of the population operates under the belief that pay goes down when mean employer’s don’t care and pay goes up when employees empathize.

Thus, there should be minimum wage laws to force them to care. Places with low minimum wage laws obviously don’t care enough, especially about children.

Breaking people’s hunter-gatherer economic superstitions is going to be even harder than breaking their hunter-gatherer sexual superstitions, and that has taken millenia.

@ Brian C.

“If your argument as I read it, is to legalize all drugs include hard drugs like LSD, and Meth (which the stats you provide include these type of offensives), then you would also have to assume substance abuse would also increase. ”

Actually you should expect the opposite to occur. As drug use is commercialized the incentive structure is to sell lower potency types of the drug in question. Look at the change in structure of the kinds of alcohol sold during prohibition vs. after prohibition. It primarily went from spirits to beer & wine.

This is also what happened in Portugal when they decriminalized everything 10 years ago. Marijuana use went up, but the use of Harder drugs went down, despite the now greater availability and lower effective cost of taking them. The various pathologies related to illegal drug use also plummeted.

Also, since use is no longer criminalized the users are now much more open to seeking substance abuse treatment. Again, this has been the Portugal experience.

The biggest change I think from ending the war on drugs is simply the subsequent change in police culture that would occur over time. Refocusing police back on to actual crimes will make them appear much less hostile to poorer communities and I imagine that they would be much more willing to cooperate with investigations. Then there is the whole issue of effectively destroying the financial basis of most criminal gangs and thereby undercutting their power.

Looking just at the incarceration statistics does not sufficiently cover all the dynamics that would change if the war on drugs were to end.