For the first time in history, there are more than two million prisoners in American jails and prisons.

This appears to be due to tough crime policies of recent decades.

Is this a good sign that crime is being controlled? Or a bad sign that incarceration is being applied out of proportion to violations?

Good when it's violent criminals. Bad when it's harmless drug abusers and the like. I don't have the numbers on which is which, but from what I remember the second category is far too large. If anyone does have the numbers it'd be interesting.

Where did you get that number?

Here's one story:

US Prison Population--BBS

And another:

US Prison Population--ABC

Note that the ABC story is from 2000, while the BBS story is from 2003.

Here's a chart of the percentage of federal prisoners who are in for drug offenses:

Percentage Prisoners Drug Offenders

Over half the population are in for drug offenses. Legalize drugs=save over 50% on our federal prison system and take a great burden off the federal legal system.

Bail/bond people won't like it, though.

Interesting stats, AM! Violent crime is down, incarceration for drug offenders is up. In fact, that statistic doesn't take into account the fact that a lot of violent crimes are a result of drug illegality. I think the message is pretty clear what we should do, but that's just me...

Federal prosecution of drug crimes is not usually for possession, but for trafficking, selling, or manufacturing. The federal maximum sentence for possession is 1 year, and the vast majority of federal inmates have sentences over 1 year.

If you release all these convicts, you will simply increase the crime rate, even if it were legalized. People still wouldn't have the money to feed their habit, and crime would ensue.

I am for legalizing marajuana, by the way, since it is only marginally worse than cigarettes.

What are you basing that on?

My guess would be common sense

These people in jail were found guilty of a crime in a court of law..

Remove these people from jail and place them back into society, maybe not all, but some will continue committing unlawful acts.

This in turn will increase criminal activity, even if the slightest, it is still an increase..

Right... but it's not like they're locked up forever you know. I'd rather have someone who buys marijuana on the streets than someone who was raped in prison and became a hardened criminal.

I agree on the Marijuana issue..

Although Cocaine, crack, crystal meth and the like are much more detrimental to society..

Maybe I should hop over to the legalize marijuana thread

Did we increase the crime rate by releasing bootleggers when alcohol was legalized? How did people come up with the money to feed their alcohol habits?
Do people still abuse alcohol? Yes, but there isn't the criminal aspect. There shouldn't be extraordinary amounts of money to be made capitalizing off of others' chemical dependency.

So the more drug users we throw in the slammer, the less crime we have? Sounds like a match made in heaven to me.

Edited: thrown-->throw

To whom/what are you referring?

From the article linked



Crime rates declined, drug incarceration duration increased. So we got the potheads off the street and crime goes down. More potheads in jail = more prisoners = less crime. Win win win! More prisoners = good thing.

Can you prove a link between drug incarcerations and violent crime rates?

The article says it all, incarceration for drug related crimes went up, crime went down. That is link enough for me.

Do you honestly think that taking a doper off of the street doesn't reduce crime? One more doper in prison is one less person looking to commit a crime to fund an out of control drug habit.

Here is another article that should help answer your question, and provides a lot of viewpoints that are relevant to the subject of this thread.

http://www.oths.k12.il.us/sstudies/daym/Cr...ime%20Bust.html

Well if two unconnected phenomena are good enough for that's fine. Your article on the other hand offers no PROOF that drug incarcerations reduce violent crime.

I think our society would benefit from reviewing our criminal justice system. I think more punishments and/or fine or community service punishments could be used to reduce the prison population.

If we can keep people in a routine where they have to provide for there own support I think we could reduce the number of institutionalized criminals.

The biggest problem with this is that being soft on crime is a losing proposition for politicians. And if any furlough or halfway house program provides a Willie Horton incident then some politician or administrator is going to have a career get flushed down the toilet.

Right, Gandalfh. And the neighborhoods that have the most churches have the most crime, therefore churches cause crime.*

(* or are correlated with population density, take your pick)

Common sense indicates that "And the neighborhoods that have the most churches have the most crime, therefore churches cause crime" is utterly false. Of course nobody said that common sense was common

Did crime rates go up when prohibition ended? Obviously, there would be less crime if there were less laws. Common sense states legalizing drugs reduces crime.

Since this topic is centering on drug laws, as well it should, I have a question.

Would mandatory life-without-parole sentences for drug sales be a deterrent? Sooner or later there'd be noone left who was willing to sell. Maybe sooner than later. Treat buyers as sick, for the most part, but show no mercy to sellers.

Thank you for asking and I apologize for not linking a news story about this. (I could not get the linking key to work.) I thought this had been reported in enough news media to be well known. My fault for not documenting this better.

If you arrested everyone in America you could eliminate crime. If a guy smoke Marijuana how am I affected? If I said I don't like George W. Bush should I be arrested because there is a higher chance I could kill the president than someone who loves Dubya? If we outlawed potatoes there would be a lot more potato arrests and potato related violent crime. We should try to stop crime not certain things that might cause crime.

This is a pretty good article that explains why the crime rate has been rising for the past few years:

Why Rising Crime Rate?

The causes of crime rate increases are highly complex. I don't think common sense one-liners hold any water in this debate.

Of course, stricter drug laws, such as enforced mandatory life-without-parole to first time drug dealers, would probably decrease the crime rate. It's self evident, kind of like if we executed, or put everyone in jail forever for any crime would reduce the crime rate. Juvenile offenders would have to be included as well, or there would be a booming juvenile drug underground.

Personally, I think it would be an unjust system. Should a 'dealer' who is really just a kid with small bag of marijuana serve the same time as an international drug trafficker?

In Singapore, public caning is the punishment for graffiti vandalism (it is arguably the cleanest city in the world), many arab countries cut off hands for stealing, ect. I am sure those countries have lower rates of vandalism and theft. I still wouldn't back those actions. Things aren't really THAT bad here, crime-wise, are they?

I doubt it. Besides, it sounds "cruel and unusual" to me. And why resort to such draconian measures, except to prove that we can be just as barbaric as the most backward, despotic nations in the world? The solution is quite simple and billions of dollars cheaper: eliminate all laws punishing victimless crimes. Legalize all drugs, legalize all consensual sex acts, legalize gambling, legalize prostitution: stop legislating peoples' bodies. Heavily penalize violent crime, sure, and finally start cracking down on the white collar crimes which wreaks havoc with our economy.

Not only would our prison population be halved (at the very, very least), but the country would be a healthier, happier, more prosperous place to live in general. Heck, we'd even have some of that so-called "freedom" that everyone keeps going on about.

Isn't it cruel and unusual to sell drugs to a 9 year old?

Nothing cruel, unusual or barbaric about it. Visit any hospital emergency ward on a Sat night and see the havoc caused by the very thing you want to legalize. Then drop into a rehab and listen to the stories of lives ruined. On your way home stop at a cemetary. Any one will do. Seek out those with life spans less than 30 years. Far too many of them lie there as a result of those harmless drugs you'd like to see made legal.

I sure am glad you provided such definitive numerical evidence of these thousands of untold victims of marijuana. Oh wait, you didn't.

Like I said, I've never known anyone who has ended up dying in hospital from marijuana use. Then again, this isn't a legalization discussion...

But your post does demonstrate an inherent contradiction in your argument. Many people in the U.S. (like my statistics?) are in jail for mere possession. Here we go:Marijuana Arrests and Incarceration in the United States



Now, if we are to accept your argument that drug trafficking represents cruel and unusualy punishment; then you are making USERS out to be the victim. Anyone that is cruelly punished must be perceived as such. If that's true they don't belong in your prisons.

I don't see anyone on this thread arguing that drugs are harmless. A more relevant question is: "Does keeping drugs illegal actually reduce drug abuse?" I'm not at all sure that it does, and I don't see anyone making the case that it does, just taking it for granted and arguing from there. The experience of Prohibition certainly doesn't support that theory. Instead of less alcohol abuse, we got sometimes lethal bathtub gin, speakeasies, gang wars, political corruption and general disrespect for the law. When we learned our lesson and repealed Prohibition, we still had alcohol abuse but it was manageable, certainly more so than those other problems.

When drugs are illegal, they sell at exorbitant black market prices, which draws organized crime and even terrorists into the drug importing and distribution business. The more you restrict the supply, the more profit there is in it, and the more the drug lords use horrific threats and enormous bribes to corrupt the system. By the laws of economics you can't possibly win, except maybe by really drastic measures such as draconian penalties and the cancellation of civil liberties, and that approach is not one that I can see as acceptable in a Republic based on individual rights. In Singapore, sure, since there you have an island nation with easily controlled borders and few political rights.

I endorse the Wertz approach to reducing crime.

Some of this should probably be pursued in one of the drug-related threads, but as it bears on the reasons why our prisons are so overpopulated, I'll proceed - though we should be cautious of straying too far from the topic.

The things you describe, P51, are the results of drugs like heroin being illegal. Very few people, if any, have ever died of an overdose of pure heroin. The problem is the things with which heroin is cut - notably quinine (though heroin cut with strychnine isn't that good for one either). You can find a fairly detailed examination of the overdose myth here and a somewhat shorter version, covering some of the same points, here. And, because drug paraphernalia is also illegal in most places - especially syringes and so on (here in Florida, even sandwich bags can get one arrested), addicts are much more likely to share needles, contributing to the spread of hepatitis, AIDS, and other potentially deadly blood-born diseases. Were heroin, for example, legalized and regulated, there would be far, far fewer people in those hospitals and cemeteries than there are today. You are right: the legal status of drugs in this country is filling not only our prisons, but also our graveyards. And you are arguing on the side of death.

By the way, P51, I have visited hospital emergency wards. I have brought one of my sons, a heroin addict (in recovery for the past several years), to such a ward because he once used junk cut with Rohypnol. I have worked in rehab clinics here and in Ireland and have counselled heroin, cocaine, and alcohol addicts. I have visited the graves of friends who died because the drugs with which they were involved were illegal - not because they were harmful of themselves. I am very well-informed on this topic, okay? And I never claimed that hard drugs were harmless - thanks for putting words in my mouth yet again - but they are immensely more harmful because of their illegal, unregulated status.

The punishment you suggest is cruel and unusual because the crimes you describe should not be crimes in the first place. Were drugs - all drugs - legal and regulated, no one would be selling to nine-year-olds; no one would be cutting drugs and creating deadly cocktails; no one would be spreading fatal diseases via syringe; no one would be filling our prisons for drug-related "crimes", apart from those violating the regulations - and they should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

Besides, P51, you were recommending this "life-without-parole" sentence for all drug traffic. To imprison someone at all for selling a substance which is more harmless than alcohol or tobacco is itself criminal. And barbaric. No doubt you would recommend life imprisonment for someone who gives a beer or a cigarette to an underage teen.

Finally, you seem to be suggesting that it's okay to sanction laws which presume to protect people from themselves. It is not. Such laws, apart from rather abrogating free will, are ridiculously, unconstitutionally invasive. Without them, we would go a long way toward emptying our prisons.

Legalizing and regulating all drugs wouldn't work. Here are just a few of the reasons;

1--regulating would involve purity. More potent drugs would then be sold illegaly and we're back to square one.

2--since I'm sure we would regulate against use by 9 yr olds, someone would sell to them. Illegaly.

3--comparisons to alcohol and nicotine are not legitimate. The vast majority of those who use hard drugs become addicted rather quickly. That addiction prevents them from acting as productive members of society in short order. Result, an entire population that will have to be supported by our tax dollars. Sorry, not interested. The same can not be said for alcohol and/or tobacco.

Drug dealers are purveyors of death. Making them pay with their own lives, free lives that is, seems quite the appropriate penalty.

WRONG. The problem with the illegal drug trade is impurity. Regulated drugs would necessarily be pure. If cut, it would be with safe substances. Every dose would be graded and measured, standardized. Drug use could be controlled and, as with methadone (or nicotine patches), the user could be weaned off the addiction if s/he so desired. Many addicts aren't the brightest bulbs in the chandelier, but few of them are barking mad. No user in their right mind would resort to paying ridiculously inflated black market prices for drugs of dubious and variable quality which could be cut with lethal substances when there was a safe, cheap, efficacious alternative readily available. At the moment, they all do. The black market for illegal drugs would dry up the way the black market for illegal alcohol dried up following Prohibition.


WRONG. There would not be enough demand by elementary school children to keep any black marketeer in business. How many people currently support themselves by selling alcohol to nine-year-olds? Or tobacco? Or firearms? Or pornography? Or voter registration cards? Any?


WRONG. Comparisons to alcohol and tobacco are perfectly legitimate. Alcohol and nicotine users, too, become addicted rather quickly. Heroin, amphetamines, and cocaine do not prevent those addicted from acting as productive members of society.

We all know this is true of cocaine addicts - were they all as debilitated as you imagine, Wall Street, Congress, Hollywood, and Madison Avenue would collapse. Or are you only condemning the drugs used by impoverished minorities rather than occupants of the Oval Office?

For a little bit of truth about junk, might I suggest you check out Heroin Is Harmless. I disagree with the title - I feel that all addictive substances, from sugar to crank, are on some level harmful - but the data is all quite accurate. I have personally known and counselled literally dozens of heroin addicts who lead full productive lives, hold down jobs, pay taxes, raise families, do volunteer work - while using. You are trafficking in mythology.

There are hundreds of thousands of dysfunctional alcoholics in this country. Visit any hospital emergency ward on a Sat night and see the havoc caused alcoholism and drunkenness. Then drop into an AA meeting and listen to the stories of lives ruined. On your way home stop at a cemetery. Then also consider the battered spouses, the raped children, the vandalism, the traffic accidents, the brawls, the hooliganism which result from alcohol abuse. At least most drug users, when not having to support black market prices, are relatively passive and not moved to commit crime. The same can not be said for the horrors of alcohol abuse by any means.

In the Smoking Ban thread, I testified to the fact that I - and hundreds of my colleagues - have become significantly less productive due to the combination of nicotine addiction and smoking having been banned from the workplace. The same can be said for alcohol and/or tobacco. Fortunately, heroin, cocaine, and amphetamine addictions are easier to kick than alcohol or nicotine addictions.


WRONG AGAIN. Check out the heroin link. Anti-drug campaigners are the real purveyors of death, P51. Though I would not subject even them to a life sentence without parole. The penalty seems a bit harsh for the crime of stupidity.


I would again argue that the government has no business legislating the human body. The government has no business prosecuting victimless crimes. But when the government starts treating medical problems as criminal problems and declaring war on a health issue, it is not just wrong, it is criminally insane.

We'll have to agree to disagree with everything in your post except this, which I want to clarify.

Drug use is a health issue and should be treated as such.

Drug sales are criminal and should be treated as such.

I wouldn't want anyone reading your summary to assume my stance is anything else.

Apologies, P51, if my final paragraph appeared to be directed at your posting - it was intended as an overall restatement of my position. I tend to double-space (or is it triple?) between sections of my posts which address different participants' postings or which change the subject somewhat, though I realize it isn't necessarily all that clear...

Would you agree, then, that penalties for possession and use of controlled substances should be decriminalized? And what is your position - or anyone else's - on other victimless crimes (since this thread has been focussing primarily on drugs so far)? Prostitution, e.g., or sodomy laws? I realize there are other threads devoted to these topics in detail, so I'm just asking whether people feel that the removal of these types of laws from the books would significantly decrease our prison population and, if so, should they be revoked?

I don't think there's anyone imprisoned only for sodomy today, is there? I would expect that strange law would only be used to increase the sentence of a violent sexual offender.

Prostitution should be legalized. It IS legal here, in much of Nevada (not Las Vegas). There are several brothels fairly close to our house, and we have a very nice, low crime neighborhood.
I have heard it argued that legalized prostitution would lower the incidence of sexual crime. I disagree with this. I simply think someone who is a consenting adult should be able to pay for sex with another consenting adult, in a safe and relatively clean environment. I don't know how anyone could find an objection to this, especially when the euphemistically entitled 'escort services' are already doing it.

I favor decriminalizing drug use and lean toward decriminalization of prostitution and sodomy. The drug use would have to go hand-in-hand with the severest of penalties for any form of illegal sales. I also wouldn't want to see a single tax dollar spent providing a drug.

Making any of that work with the government regulating it would be a real bear though.

p51:


Why do you think that is so? I don't know where one would get the figures to research this from the time of prohibition, but I think it's a safe bet to say that the cost of policing prohibition was quite a bit higher than the cost of regulating alcohol, which is mostly given to the states and to the stores selling the alcohol. Those stores aren't complaining, because the demand for alcohol is constant, and not a money-losing inventory. The same would be true, I am sure, for drugs. We already have the regulation, through pharmacies, for many drugs, including opium derivatives. I don't think it would be hard to adapt to the regulating of other, currently illegal drugs.

I personally would like to see prisons treated like large Zen monasteries. Imagine the good that would come out of getting prisoners to learn meditation. Prison is already like seshin. And if you think this sounds like some crazy hippy idea, I assure you it's not. There was a study done awhile back (sorry I can't source it, memory must suffice) in which inmates were taught transcendental meditation and the recidivism rates dropped fairly drastically. I don't dig the whole TM scene, but some hardcore Zen meditation would be most excellent. Every prison could have a roshi, and prisoners would have to meditate for, say, three hours each day. I imagine the benefits would be fairly amazing.

I think the prison idea is excellent, Quarkhead, but unfortunately I don't think it will ever happen in our society. Criminals, to the masses, are objects of hatred, things with no souls that scare you in the night - not people.
However, I think legalizing all drugs across the board out of thin air would be detrimental in the short run, especially after all that misinformation the government *loves* to throw into the mix.

I would suggest setting up "drug stores," kind of like liquor stores but instead of needing ID's of proof of age you would need a "Proof of Understanding" ID (at least in the short run) that proved that you had taken an informative government-sanctioned class that tought you the TRUTH, unhindered, about what you were purchasing and it's effects, both positive and negative. None of that "Smoking pot will make you have 50 AIDS infected babies!" B.S.

I doubt there are many, but there are definitely some. I've been unable to find many statistics so far - the Bureau of Justice Statistics, for example, lumps "non-forced sodomy" in with "other sexual offenses" like "fondling and molestation", and incest, which, combined, account for about 3.4% of our prison population. I doubt that sodomy accounts for much of that. Indeed, there are probably more people arrested and imprisoned for loitering with intent to commit an indecent act than for actually committing the same.

In Alabama, for example (one of the few states I could find which bothered breaking out sodomy stats), of 25,871 received inmates for 1999-2000, 398 were arrested on Sodomy I charges (which I suspect is forced sodomy), while only 58 were arrested on Sodomy II charges. So, you're right in general, sodomy laws probably don't account for a significant portion of the prison population. Though, with our incarcerated population as swollen as it is, the release of every inmate jailed for no good reason would help. Clearly, illicit drug laws (I refer to the laws, not the drugs, as "illicit" ) count for the majority of our unnecessary prison figures, though prostitution-related crimes are no doubt substantial as well (if of lesser duration).

Apologies for not including links to the above - I lost my search window before I could transfer the URLs. If anyone insists, I can try to recreate my search path when I have more time. I doubt anyone will find any of the stats cited that outrageous, though.

:::::::::::::::::::::::::

quarkhead: I, too, feel that a bit of meditation would do no harm and , quite possibly, a good deal of good - especially in terms of recidivism. However - one would have extreme difficulty trying to sell such an idea in a country where the majority of the population believes that our Founding Fathers were all Puritans, that the Constitution was written by Jesus himself, and that Buddhism is a branch of Satanism - probably run by communists. In addition, xgx has a pretty good point as well. Our prison system isn't about rehabilitation, it is about vengeance. Sorta like our foreign policy at the moment.

wertz:


Yeah, I know it's a dream - but, but, it's a good dream...
And damn it, the only reason I became a Buddhist was because I thought it WAS a branch of Satanism. Are you saying it's not?

And I second the retribution over rehabilitation statement too. I have a cousin in prison right now, and it's no joke. Not that it should be a joke, of course. And as more and more prisons are being privatized (much to the detriment of all concerned, just ask New Mexico), I fear the focus will be more and more on punishment over rehabilitation. One of my greatest fears for my cousin is that his time in prison will turn him from a kid who did something stupid with the wrong crowd of guys into a hardened, angry criminal.

In some ways, the publicly humiliating punishments of the past - pillories, etc, were more honest. Today we stick our prisoners in places where we never see them being punished - the less we know, the better we can feel about ourselves. I like the idea of say, deadbeat dads having to wear signs reading, "I neglected my children by not paying child support!" Maybe give rapists and paedophiles big tattoos on their foreheads. Not sure about the whole cutting-off-the-hands-for-theives bit though...

I'm remembering the uproar over the 3 minutes of silent meditation before the start of class, and I'm thinking you could never begin to enforce 3 HOURS anywhere. Not a bad idea, though, if it were possible.

A footnote on victimless crime legislation: I'm not quite sure if this is entirely on-topic, but it could account for some of the numbers of people in prison. One of the reasons, I believe, that sodomy laws are still on the books in several states (though, in a few of them, like Texas, they only apply to homosexuals), is that they are convenient. Similar to marijuana laws - and the way they were applied in the sixties, these laws are red herrings. They are a way of incarcerating inconvenient people who have not otherwise broken any laws.

During many student anti-war demonstrations during the Vietnam crisis, once it was found that charges like "inciting to riot" were difficult to prosecute, hundreds of people suddenly started being arrested instead for possession. I expect that sodomy laws are a good way to get certain people out of the way - even the threat of prosecution may help keep uppity queers in line. And we all know how effective, say, oral sex can be for discrediting a political opponent.

One wonders how many of those two million might be, say, political dissidents or minority activists incarcerated for victimless crimes simply to get them out of the way. There's also a possible percentage who are, perhaps, simply troublesome gang members who couldn't be locked up on more serious charges but were got off the street via an easier route. It could even be a way of keeping minorities themselves in check - we know how most of them would vote, were they able...

This is somewhat speculative, but is it not possible that this is one reason there's so much resistance to removing these spurious laws from the books?

The Zen meditation, or any real attempt at reform, sounds good. It would be nice to try and take a progressive path rather than one of vengeance. Unfortunately, it is easier said than done. I think the best illustration that prisons aren't going to take any steps towards true reformation of prisoners comes from the sodomy laws, actually.

I mean, really... who expects a person convicted of sodomy to reform in a prison?


[As to the last post, I can see your point there, Wertz]

To expand this debate a bit, this is a chilling notion:

Slavery Returns?

So, should prisoners be hired out to private industry? Could this be part of the reason our prison population keeps growing so large?