These are federal offenses only. Most crime is prosecuted at the state level and the majority of that isn't drug offenses.

And the people in federal prison for drugs don't get there by smoking pot on their front porch. They're mostly there for trafficking.

That's a good point. I did address the other levels here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23655174 but it was harder to find more of a breakdown in the data.

I don't have a link handy but it's around 15% of the total prison population who are in for drug offences.

I do have a link handy: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2020.html

Thanks! So between 10 & 20% are in for drugs -- the lower figure if I try to exclude trafficking (although roughly, as they don't always break it down). And this means "in for nothing harder than drugs" since they are counting by the worst conviction.

It is mind-blowing how misleading this is. You should really consider editing your post. The majority of people in state prisons are there for VIOLENT CRIMES, and the plurality of people in local jails are there for violent crimes.

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2020.html

But you're also missing the point. I was responding to a comment that said we should dismiss drug related crimes. Maybe that is missing now that the person removed that comment but essentially they said

> we're not talking about drug, we're talking about violent crime.

So my response was more in the lines of "we can't dismiss drugs when they are a big factor."

Note: this is also why HN tries to prevent editing, because now the context of what I was responding to is completely lost.

>Here's the breakdown of why people are in jail:

Your stats are not why people are in jail nor prison. Your stats represent an extremely narrow selection of prisoners meeting the "federal" criteria. Your information is misleading to make it look like most people in jail are due to drug offenses, which is factually untrue.

My point is that outright dismissing drug related charges is ludicrous. But it appears that the parent edited their comment to the point of removal so this context was lost. I have edited my response to clarify.

Don't even know why I'm going to bother, but most of those drug offenses are trafficking crack/cocaine and meth, a large percentage of them also involve weapons. It's not people who were smoking weed on the porch.

https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/dofp12.pdf

You're being very selective. Federal prison only accounts for 22.3% of drug offending inmates[0]. Specifically in jails -- where 74% of occupants are not currently charged -- possession accounts for 56% of drug related offenses. Drugs accounts for 21% of occupants, (23% of convictions, 25.5% of non-convicted). In state prisons possession accounts for 25.5% of drug related offenses and 3.5% of the total state prison.

Jails, County, State, and Federal prisons are all different. It would definitely make sense that the more serious convictions, especially with harder drugs, goes to federal. That's kinda the point of federal...

[0] https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2020.html

Back to the preventive vs reactive. If you legalize all drugs, sell the harsh drugs in a controlled setting, the existing black markets would be destroyed. This argument will continue to be a circle, if we are saying "x people arrested" but "y shouldnt be a crime in the first place" "well y has to be illegal, look how much x we have."

All of the money put into cops, lawyers, prosecution, sentencing, prison, parole, etc could be put into tackling the consequences of legal use.

All of the money currently flowing into the black market, into gangs, into crime and violence causers, would try up.

4 in 10 arrests are marijuana related of those "As has long been the case, around nine-in-ten U.S. marijuana arrests are for possessing the drug, rather than selling or manufacturing it."

How many of those that graduated to crack/meth etc. started out with simple marijuana arrests?

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/01/22/four-in-ten...

The difference is looking at federal prisons vs arrests and other prisons. Federal is for more egregious crimes, so it would make sense that less of them are for pot and more for harsher drugs.

It is difficult, but we have to try to be aware of the biases in the data we have. I should have mentioned in my first post that those were just federal stats. But I try to break down more in another comment state and jails, specifically about possession statistics.

I don't know, I was just pointing out the fact that people in federal prison are not there for smoking weed on the porch. I don't have the numbers handy, but I would guess that a vast majority of the marijuana arrests in your article result in a fine or probation at the very most.

Which I happen to agree is a waste of resources and probably does more harm than good by getting people started "in the system".

> so yeah we are talking about things like pot.

Only if you want to talk about the non-violent half to paint a picture that it’s pointless.

For the sake of discussion, assume pot is legal and those drug arrests didn’t happen. Low income areas still have higher rates of violent crime.

Is your argument that drug criminalization is causing other violent crimes?

Drug criminalization causes some but certainly not all violent crime.

Creating an unregulated black market for which there is high demand always increases violent crime.

My point is dismissing drugs from the equation is dumb when it makes up almost half the convictions.

Is that global statistics or statistics for "over policed" neighbourhoods the article and discussion is about?

> Is that global statistics or statistics for "over policed" neighbourhoods the article and discussion is about?

Neither, it is US statistics.

Getting specifically the "over policed neighborhoods" statistics is a little trickier but when you do some location of arrest lookups you do see a higher percentage of arrests coming from those neighborhoods, so it would make for a reasonable assumption that those neighborhoods are a representative demographic of this dataset (if you're drawing from two jars and you draw 80% from one jar and 20% from the second jar, the marbles you have is a better representation of the contents of the first jar than they are of the second jar).