Re:From a life prison sentence to a computer engineering job
by likpok on Sunday October 20, 2019 @11:32PM
(#21309137)
A much larger proportion of people are in federal prison for drugs than state prisons. (Gut check: there are few federal crimes that people regularly go to prison for, trafficking is one of them).
John Pfaff has done a lot of research into this [1], and drug offenders are a small minority (~20%) of prisoners. The bulk of prisoners are in for violent crimes, which makes the politics of decarceration... tricky.
[1]: https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=16...
Wait? What?
I'm from Wisconsin, and my second home is in Texas. In both places, non-violent drug offenders constitute the bulk of inmates by far. About 77000 of roughly 131000 inmates in Texas are in for drugs without theft or violent charges. If you factor out the ones in for big time distribution, it's about 62000 of the 131000.
https://www.texastribune.org/library/data/texas-prisons/crim...
Are you absolutely certain they said only 10% of people in prisons are drug offenders? In any case, at least where I'm from, drug offenders are, by far, the majority of the incarcerated.
EDIT: Hmm, it just occurred to me, are you only talking about Federal system prisons? Because most of our inmates are actually in the 50 state prison systems.