Not to downplay the issue in Europe but there are 111 inmates per 100,000 people in the EU. In the US it's 698.

That shows the amplitude and the spread of the carceral problem in the US.

The conditions once you're in are also starkly worse in the US. More people, for longer periods, in worse living conditions.

Only 2% of the incarcerated population has had a trial[0]. How can we even prove that there is a crime problem with that type of statistic?

0: https://github.com/MKorostoff/incarceration-in-real-numbers/...

Do we have something to compare this number to? Don't we expect most crimes to not go to trial, if the convicted person agrees that they committed the crime?

France has 4% plea bargains[0], so 96% trials.

0: http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/olin_center/fellows_pape...

France trial are not "jury of your peer" trial. If I'm not mistaken, only the "Cour d'assises" has jurors. "Being judged by your peer" is not an enshrined Right in Europe.

Cool, thanks for the paper. It looks interesting from the abstract.

Do they agree that they committed the crime or are they just making a tradeoff of a definite 5 years vs. a probable 25 years or something similar due to plea bargains?

From what I am reading, especially in drug cases this the tradeoff a lot of people are making. Add to this being poor and lacking legal education this is a rational choice.

That's what I'm wondering, is there a way to measure how common this situation is? I'd be curious to see

It's true that most American prisoners are not "nonviolent drug user" inmates. However, around 250,000 of them are [1]. That's still a huge chunk of human life.

As a side note, I think HN readers may get a lot out of reading [1], which is a pretty concise look at the American prison system and some of the facts and myths around it.

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

People seem to forget how devastating drugs are to communities. We see it right now with meth and poor whites. It was (is?) true about African Americans and crack cocaine. There is no “legalize it” solution with these drugs. If you want to rehab low level offenders, fine. But high level offenders, the people running the operations, deserve their sentences.

I think you're missing the fact that illegalization is pushing these substances and their users into the black market, deep in the margins of society, and essentially leaving the rest of us powerless. If we were to own up and legalize it, we would be in a better position to treat it and to apply preventive measures. Plus we wouldn't be financing the underworld. As far as I can tell, facing the hard issues, like working with the most disadvantaged people, is the only thing that makes a difference, while illegalization is about rejecting them.

> I think you're missing the fact that illegalization is pushing these substances and their users into the black market

These laws generally come from the local community, not the token "evil" <insert-color-of-choice> man in a foreign country...

That's comically untrue. The drug war is a policy coined and handed down by the Nixon and subsequent White House administrations on the rest of the West, and in the US it does have strong racist undertones (see minimum sentences for crack cocaine compared to powdered cocaine).

Not even sure what you mean by laws coming from local communities. To someone involved in the drug industry illegalization is a conundrum. On the one hand, you might get punished. On the other hand, you're incentivized to do it, because you'll make a lot of money filling the supply vacuum left by the formal economy. Add bad socioeconomic conditions into the mix and poverty becomes much scarier than criminal prosecution.

> There is no “legalize it” solution with these drugs

That's why keeping in mind the difference between legalization and decriminalization is important.

You still need criminalization as a “stick” to either get people into rehab or not take these drugs at all.

Criminalization doesn't work. We have known this for decades. Destroying people's lives perpetuates the problem. Treat drug addiction as a public health issue and it needs to go hand-in-hand with poverty reduction.

Is there a drug that could be legalized and/or prescribed in a safe setting that would be less harmful than these?

Or, what is the social need that the drug pretends to fill, and can that need be met in a better way before addictions get out of hand?

Is there evidence people do drugs to fill a social need?

We have a carceral problem despite your scare quotes and your unsupported assertions.

It's not a scare quote. It's how reasonable people approach novel turns of phrase so that they don't become part of our culturally accepted common knowledge without any basis in fact.

1/5 or 20% of people currently incarcerated are for non-violent drug use. This article tries to downplay it by reversing the statistic saying 4/5's aren't non-violent drug offenders. So about ~450k are incarcerated for non-violent drug possession in any given day.

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

Our prison inhabitants really started spiking in the 1980s, so anyone born after that doesn't know a different world other than what we have now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...

Afaik, Americans do not commit 6 times more crime then Europeans.

Did you bother actually looking up the data? Because intentional homicide in the US is indeed more than 6x greater than it is in places like Austria and Switzerland.

There is no country in western Europe with anywhere near the violent crime rate as the US.

Yes I did. US has 3 times more murder then average EU. That is not the same as 6 times more. And some of surplus is one person killing more people, so you then have one person being in prison instead of multiple.

And murder clearance rates are low anyway, so that on itself can't be reason for disparity.

Switzerland has super low murders.

I am inclined to believe that criminal inclination is a human universal. I am also inclined to believe that the American system catches and punishes more criminals (as a percentage) than the European systems. But some disparity does seem to exist.

One of the few unchecked powers of the US president is the pardon. I never understood why Obama (now Trump) didnt just pardon all federal non violent drug offenders on the last day of his 2nd term...

“Non violent drug offenders” is probably really hard to specify at the next level of detail.

Similar categories are already specified in the penal code. Take a look at federal sentencing guidelines.

Yeah, but he doesn't need to. He can leave that to the courts.

I doubt he prioritized that over the political baggage it would create for his successors or his personal life. I wish he had been inspired by carter, but politically I think this must seem riskier than those pardons. The rhetoric around why prisoners shouldn't vote seem to underly a lot of the same thinking, but I wish we knew their rationale.

People spend their lives scrambling for power. Then when they get it, they're out of ideas after "Tax Cuts!". Zero vision, just self interest...

Private prisons are a problem, but they are also sort of an overemphasized canard. They house under 10% of the prison population, and for several of the larger states it's none at all.

American state run prisons and their surrounding ecosystem of courts, municipal govts, vendors, etc have much of the perverse incentives and a far larger overall footprint

> American state run prisons and their surrounding ecosystem of courts, municipal govts, vendors, etc have much of the perverse incentives

Why do these institutions have perverse incentives? Is it because the voters reward high imprisonment rates because it creates the impression of safety?

Just to pick on one player, California prison workers’ union have immense political power. They have many members, and their self-interest is more prisons and more prisoners.

To go further, when you warehouse a bunch of people who can’t vote in a geographical area, you create a situation where few voters get to wield disproportionate power at all levels.

Also, if you warehouse people of child rearing age, then you’ll get fewer of that demographic in future elections (20 years from now).

I took a quick look at campaign financing laws in some other countries (UK, Germany, Canada, and Japan) and it seemed that the U.S. was the exception in allowing trade unions and industry associations to give money to politicians, along with unrestricted corporate contributions to political causes.

What would be considered bribery in many other countries is still legal in the U.S.

It is. The history as most voters perceive it is: crime was high and rising fast in the 70s and 80s, until we got "tough on crime" in the late 80s and early 90s, and crime finally started declining once all the criminals knew we'd be tough. So they conclude that the modern American justice system is what's causing crime to decline, and are concerned that being "soft on crime" would make crime start spiking again.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a fan of mass incarceration, but you can see where the skepticism of reform comes from. It's impossible to overstate how bad things were perceived to be in the 90s.

Other commenter has good points too, but I primarily meant that there are still many many people (and entire rural towns!) making and dependent on the money involved. Even if the running of the prisons is "public".