Re:The War on Drugs and Prison Growth: Limited importance an...
by simplulo on Thursday August 20, 2015 @11:43AM
(#10092551)
Three quarters of US murder victims are male, and more than half are black. The same goes for US murderers, to which we can add that more than half are under 30, and more than half use handguns (not an inexpensive tool). I suspect that the circumstances more often involve drug gangs than domestic violence. It seems unlikely to me that Drug Prohibition could be such a big factor in murder but not in other crime or incarceration.
Drug inmates’ share of unique offenders is basically the same as their share of inmates: about 20%, or 26% if we count those convicted of both drug and non-drug offenses as “drug offenders,” compared to 17% of the total stock
When you look at state and local prison statistics, or at least the ones I've looked at during message board arguments, you quickly see that drug crimes do not dominate; in the midwest, the dominating crime appears to be domestic violence.
A common rebuttal to that point is that at any point in time, there may be more domestic violence inmates in prison, but the overall flow of drug offenders is greater: they serve shorter but more frequent sentences; the "installment plan", as the author puts it.
The statistics don't appear to bear that out. The tables that precede this point are interesting, too. To the extent that prison is a "revolving door" for inmates, that too does not appear to be the explaining factor for mass incarceration.