Pubdate: Tue, 20 Oct 2015
Source: San Diego Union Tribune (CA)
Copyright: 2015 Union-Tribune Publishing Co.
Contact:  http://www.utsandiego.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/386
Note: Seldom prints LTEs from outside it's circulation area.
Author: Charles Lane

PANDERING ON POT

No presidential debate this year would be complete without 
denunciations of the drug laws, which, it is alleged, result in long 
prison terms for thousands of people, disproportionately African 
Americans, who are guilty only of low-level offenses, thus fueling 
"mass incarceration."

At the last Republican debate, former Hewlett-Packard Chief Executive 
Carly Fiorina charged that "two-thirds of the people in our prisons 
are there for nonviolent offenses, mostly drug-related."

Apropos of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush's admitted youthful marijuana 
use, Sen. Rand Paul observed that "there is at least one prominent 
example on the stage of someone who says they smoked pot in high 
school, and yet the people going to jail for this are poor people, 
often African Americans and often Hispanics, and yet the rich kids 
who use drugs aren't."

When Democrats faced off recently, Sen. Bernie Sanders said he is for 
marijuana legalization, "because I am seeing in this country too many 
lives being destroyed for nonviolent offenses. We have a criminal 
justice system that lets CEOs on Wall Street walk away, and yet we 
are imprisoning or giving jail sentences to young people who are 
smoking marijuana."

"I agree completely with the idea that we have got to stop 
imprisoning people who use marijuana. ... We have a huge population 
in our prisons for nonviolent, low-level offenses that are primarily 
due to marijuana," the front-running former secretary of state, 
Hillary Clinton, chimed in.

Too bad this bipartisan agreement is contradicted by the evidence. 
Fiorina's numbers are exaggerated: In 2014, 46 percent of all state 
and federal inmates were in for violent offenses (murder, rape, 
robbery and aggravated assault), according to the latest Justice 
Department data. And this is a conservative estimate, since the 
definition of violent offense excludes roughly 30,000 federal 
prisoners, about 16 percent of the total, who are doing time for 
weapons violations.

Drug offenders account for only 19.5 percent of the total 
state-federal prison population, most of whom, especially in the 
federal system, were convicted of dealing drugs such as cocaine, 
heroin and meth, not "smoking marijuana."

Undeniably, the population of state prisons (which house the vast 
majority of offenders) grew from 294,000 in 1980 to 1,362,000 in 2009 
a stunning 363 percent increase  though it has been on a downward 
trajectory since the latter date.

But only 21 percent of that growth was due to the imprisonment of 
drug offenders, most of which occurred between 1980 and 1989, 
according to a review of government data reported by Fordham law 
professor John Pfaff in the Harvard Journal of Legislation. More than 
half of the overall increase was due to punishment of violent 
offenses, not drugs, Pfaff reports.

Reviewing data admittedly drawn mostly from Northern "blue" states, 
Pfaff determined that "the median stay in prison for a drug offender 
is generally about a year," and that "relatively few people appear to 
be in prison on marijuana charges"  fewer still for simple possession.

Given the relatively small share of drug offenders, ending the war on 
drugs would not significantly alter the racial disparity in 
incarceration rates, contrary to the conventional wisdom.

Blacks make up 37.5 percent of all state prisoners, about triple 
their share of the population, according to the Justice Department. 
If we released all 208,000 people currently in state prison on a drug 
charge, the proportion of African Americans in state prison would 
still be 37 percent.

In short, ending the "war on drugs" is not quite the panacea for mass 
incarceration that politicians imply.

Marijuana legalization could help reduce arrest rates, to be sure; 
and to the extent fewer people get busted for smoking pot, that 
would, indeed, cut down on the resulting undue negative personal and 
social consequences.

Otherwise, the bipartisan consensus in favor of looser drug laws is 
just the latest political free lunch, served up by politicians who 
would rather discuss anything except real public policy trade-offs.

Republicans and Democrats alike are propounding the crowd-pleasing 
notion that we can have less incarceration  saving the country 
billions of dollars and international shame  without risking an 
increase in violent crime, or other harms.

In truth, if we released all 300,000 drug offenders from state and 
federal prison, the U.S. incarceration rate would still be far higher 
than it was three decades ago, and far higher than the rates of other 
industrial democracies.

The only way to lower it dramatically would be to reduce the 
frequency and duration of imprisonment for violent crimes, while 
continuing to reduce violent crime itself.

If any of the candidates has a plan to do that, he or she should speak up.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom