> Hmmm. This is unsatisfying.

It's unsatisfying not because it's wrong, but because it replaces a tidy narrative, (a narrative which suggests a public policy many of us would like to support) with "it's complicated". I think you have the picture reversed -- the article is saying the problem is nuanced and complex when we'd rather believe it was simply the war on drugs.

>> I think you have the picture reversed -- the article is saying the problem is nuanced and complex when we'd rather believe it was simply the war on drugs.

I disagree. I think it's unsatisfying because it naively minimises the wider effects of the WoD.

I'm not American so I don't really have a vested interest in your prison population and why it's there, I only really know that compared to your population size it's huge.

I am quite pedantic though, and it looked to me like firstly it wasn't complete in its reasoning and secondly like 300K people out of 1.7M is still a very significant amount.

Rayiner's comment seems like a strong rebuttal to this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10319918

It doesn't have a strong rebuttal, because it doesn't actually have any exact figures.

It has trends which suggest it's of little relevance, sure, but nothing particularly concrete. For all we know the homicide rate in the mid 80s (for example) may have dropped to a historic low without the WoD.

Doesn't that require you to argue that transitioning from "no war on drugs" to "war on drugs" back to "no war on drugs" would reduce the murder rate, lower than it was before the war on drugs?

If not, can you help me understand why?

>> If not, can you help me understand why?

Not right now, drunk.

I'LL ALLOW IT.

I disagree w/your latter assertion: the interviewee basically claimed that ending the war on drugs would, at most, reduce the prison population by 17%.

When you have a truly complex problem, the way to solve it is to pick it apart into simpler parts. If we start with ending the war on drugs, and the prison pop only goes down 17%, we can move on to the next reform.

What I wonder is how many people were originally detained/investigated because of the WoD, but arrested/prosecuted for the non-drug offenses. (i.e. resisting, gambling, tax evasion, etc.)

Unless you know why these people were in front of the cops to begin with, you can't speak to whether any given policy change will or won't affect arrest or imprisonment rates.

e.g. Stop-and-Frisk is a War on Terror policy, but regularly results in weapons and drug charges. Are the people ultimately sentenced for those offenses in prison because of weapon or drug laws, or anti-terror laws?

Stop and Frisk is not a war on terror policy. It's a "New York used to be Gotham City in the 1990's"-era policy.

Fair enough. Yet the question remains: can you meaningfully lower arrests/convictions that resulted from stop-and-frisk, by changing the laws regarding the particular charges that are brought? If it's about a 'fishing expedition', then decriminalizing marijuana might dramatically drop drug charges, but not move net arrests much, as officers simply find something else.

NY was Gotham City. Why is there so much animosity for the 'Broken Windows' policy when it clearly worked?

Because cities without New York's policies saw the same drop in crime?

How about quality of life???

Rudy Giuliani got rid of all the annoying squeegee men that loved to shake down vehicular traffic. But now ... they're baaackkk "terrorizing city streets"!

http://nypost.com/2014/08/07/squeegee-men-are-back-and-terro... http://nypost.com/2015/07/19/squeegee-man-is-citys-latest-bl... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squeegee_man

Chicago?

The crime rate in Chicago dropped sharply. Chicago did not employ "broken windows" policing.

I'm guessing you're talking about the recent spike in shootings? That spike has a long way to go to reach the peaks of the 70s and 90s.

Because there is no proof that 'Broken Windows' worked. Crime has declined since the 90s in all major American cities: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-imprisoners-dilemma/

Additionally, I don't like the percent increases on absolute numbers. I feel like some normalized data (either per capita, or per capita in specific metropolitan areas) would be very helpful.

Ie. Fake example, The crime in San Francisco shot up by 400% - woah! So much more crime. The population in San Francisco also shot up by 10,000%. Oh, so you're telling me that the ratio of criminals to non-criminals dropped by 95%?

Ps. I don't know why I expect a better analysis from this article since it's in Slate...

Having seen the numbers, they are actually referring to the crime rate, and not raw crimes.

Your cognitive bias is showing. Common sense should tell you that a 400% increase is outstripping population growth, but here are the numbers: US population went from 183M to 252M during that period.

>> Ie. Fake example

Or cases where an initial arrest for something non-violent (such as drugs) resulted in a drastic change in life course, such as losing their job and making it very hard to find legal work, after which (combined with what they learned in prison the first time) resulted in them turning to property/violent crimes?

I thought the same thing and I totally agree that this should be covered. Thinking more about it though, the media has kinda clung to The War on Drugs any time they need to fill airtime and any time it comes up, they're pretty hand wavy about the underlying statistics. If someone had hard data on this that clearly supported WoD accusation, I feel like I would have seen it already.

I'd guess most of these records are open to the public. Maybe it would be possible to use some AI to read the records, and collect better data?

I'm not sure why you'd be downvoted for saying that, it's not objectionable...

But it might miss the point. Someone convicted of burglary may have been burgling to get money for their addiction. That may or may not be recorded. Although you might be right, maybe that sort of stuff is routinely recorded. I have no idea!

The BJS studies it:

http://www.bjs.gov/content/dcf/duc.cfm

I'd guess if they have court transcripts, or some kind of description in a plea deal, it's possible it was mentioned. That might be valuable data, but having a person scrape through that data would take ages.

I too am confused why I was down-voted, but i guess you can't please everyone :\

Don't need an AI, just use a statistically valid random sample, then use human intelligence to analyze that smaller data set.

>only 17 percent of the inmates are there primarily for drug charges.

This is either false or misleading because of how it is worded. The percentage of people serving time in state prison for drug offenses is ~53%

http://www.drugwarfacts.org/cms/Prisons_and_Drugs#sthash.eHL...

You're reading that source wrong (understandable because the wording is awkward). 53% is for violent crime.

From your source: Almost 16% of state prisoners were convicted drug offenders (208,000 inmates), including 24% of all females in state prison (22,000 inmates) and 15% of all males in state prison (186,000 inmates).

>How many are there for crimes that were committed to feed drug habits?

Legalizing drugs will not make them free, and they will still lead to addiction.

>> Legalizing drugs will not make them free, and they will still lead to addiction.

Indeed they will. But if addicts have easier access to medically supervised maintenance doses (for instance), without risking jail time, then there may be less crime committed to feed these habits. Stuff I've seen has suggested that (for instance) when heroin users know where their next hit is coming from (the clinic) they are better able to handle their addiction and able to make some progress in the rest of life (hold down a job, etc).

I'm not saying I definitely have all the answers, the picture is complex.

>when heroin users know where their next hit is coming from (the clinic) they are better able to handle their addiction and able to make some progress in the rest of life (hold down a job, etc).

That's extremely wishful thinking.

We currently have abundant access to alcohol and alcoholism is still a problem.

On the other hand, alcohol is actively pushed and widely accepted within our society. It's extremely difficult to avoid if you have a problem with it, and it's also extremely easy to develop a problem with through the numerous situations in which you are expected to consume or have access to it. Supply of substance from a clinic allows you to fulfil the needs of the existing population, without having the problem of vendors pushing the substance onto new users. ( One would hope.. )

>> That's extremely wishful thinking.

It's something I've read about coming out of the Swiss model, which medicalises heroin addiction rather than criminalising it.

I'm not going to hunt for references right now so I guess we'll have to agree to disagree.

Legalizing drugs are one thing (though 80-90% of Americans still oppose legalization for stuff like heroin). Spending non-prison public dollars on peoples' heroin addiction (while potentially a good idea), will never happen in the U.S. before the heat death of the universe.

The cost of medical heroin to feed the typical daily consumption of heroin for an addict costs in the $10-$20 range, as far as I remember. We know the costs because because heroin is manufactured and regularly prescribed as a pain killer in a number of countries, e.g. in the UK you sometime get diamorphine (heroin) prescriptions for post-operative pain.

In other words, even if it was not paid for, but just made available on prescription, chances are substantial proportion of users would be able to afford to maintain their addiction without much, if any, crime.

>> Spending non-prison public dollars on peoples' heroin addiction (while potentially a good idea), will never happen in the U.S. before the heat death of the universe.

Oh can you imagine the horror!

"Our tax dollars are going on keeping them no-good junkies in smack! Not on my watch!"

Even if it was the best thing for law and order, for society, for everyone.... yeah I know, it'll just never fly.

You would still have non-profits willing to provide treatment, even if the government is unable to do anything.

When drugs are legalized, addicts have better access to treatments and counseling and the stigma is lowered so they can be more open about their addiction.

Legalizing alcohol didn't make it free, but it sure did help with the associated violence made infamous during Prohibition.

That's the distributors/manufacturers, we are talking about the consumers.

And your point?

> Legalizing drugs will not make them free

It will make them much cheaper and thus have about the same affect.

The problem with the "drug war causes violent crime" theory is the timeline. Here is a graph of U.S. violent crime rate from 1960: http://www.newgeography.com/files/cox-crime-3.png. Here is a graph of just homicide rate since 1900: http://madeinamericathebook.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/homi.... Violent crime was steady up to about 1960 then started spiking up in the 1960's until about 1995. The homicide rate at its peak in the 1990's was only about 25% higher than what it was in 1900, long before prohibition or the drug war.

The modern controlled substances act was passed in 1970, and drug war spending started ramping up through the 1970's, and didn't really get going until the second half of the 1980's: http://blurbrain.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/drugs-vs-spe....

So what does the data tell us? Crime started spiking up about 10 years before the drug war even started. The big jump in drug war spending in the 1980's happened after two decades of rising crime, when crime rates were already near their peak. So if anything, the federal drug war (or peoples' appetite to wage it) seems to be a reaction to rising crime, rather than a cause.

Now, you could also say rising crime was the result of prohibition itself, not just the drug war per se. But narcotics began to be heavily regulated and effectively banned in 1915: http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/library/studies/cu/cu8.h....

Now, compare crime rate to incarceration rate and the timeline of the drug war: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/U.S._inc.... The incarceration rate is basically flat until 1975. By that time violent crime had increased by over 2.5x. The mind-blowing thing is that our incarceration rate doesn't catch up to our crime rate until after 1995! I.e. even though our incarceration rate quadruples from 1950 to 1995, in that time violent crime more than quadruples.

It's only after the big drop in crime in the late 1990's that our incarceration rate started to become disproportionate to our violent crime rate.

The problem with the article is that the professor doesn't just argue the points you made, but suggests we shouldn't advocate for ending the drug war or reducing sentencing:

But according to John Pfaff, a professor at Fordham Law School, neither of those efforts will make a significant dent in the problem, because they are based on a false understanding of why the prison boom happened in the first place.

"The reason it’s important to get it right is that if we’re trying to reduce the prison population, we want to make sure we do it correctly—and if you focus on the wrong thing, you won’t solve the problem. So if you think it’s the war on drugs, you might think, ‘OK, if we just decriminalize drugs, that will solve the problem.’ And, you know, it’s true that if we shift away from punishment to treatment that could be a huge improvement. But just letting people out of prison—decarcerating drug offenders—will not reduce the prison population by as much as people think. If you released every person in prison on a drug charge today, our state prison population would drop from about 1.5 million to 1.2 million. So we’d still be the world’s largest incarcerating country; we’d still have an enormous prison population.

And if we focused on cutting back sentence lengths, maybe that would weaken DAs’ bargaining power at plea bargaining, but since people aren’t serving the massively long sentences anyway, it probably won’t have that big an effect on prison population either."

This is a weird argument, because reducing the prison population by 17% is a significant dent ..

Every time this issue comes up, it seems to polarize itself: either you have to believe that ending the "drug war" will largely solve America's incarceration problem, or, for some reason, you have to support the drug war.

I don't understand the logic. It does not follow from "ending the drug war won't solve our prison problem" that "we should maintain the drug war".

There is virtually no vocal user of HN that supports the drug war. In every thread about drugs on HN, you can safely assume the entire community agrees that the "War on Drugs" is toxic.

I generally agree w/you .. I was referring to the professor who was interviewed, not HN users. I would say that the drug war component of mass-incarceration seems separable, and easier to solve than the violent crime component. It seems better strategy to me to go after the low hanging fruit, look at the results and then plan the next move.

I would worry that trying to solve the whole issue at once, like the professor seems to suggest, would be a non-starter politically.

The problem with using trends, IMHO, rather than actual recorded figures, is that you may miss out on what's going on beneath the pretty lines and curves.

I ain't saying you're wrong because I don't have the figures to rebut that. I'm not even saying that the WoD is the major cause of violent crime, definitively, because I don't have those figures either.

Literally all I'm trying to say is that the analysis in the article seems short-sighted and incomplete because it only takes into account convictions directly for drug offences.