You seem to be evading his point: "Even if every person in the U.S. incarcerated for drug possession was released tomorrow, the U.S. would still have the highest incareration rate in the world. If every drug trafficker was released, the U.S. would still have an incarceration rate triple that of every Western European country. If every non-violent offender was released, the incarceration rate would stll be double that of every western European country."

This seems like a refutation of your comment.

Note how it's a conditional - drug possession OR trafficking OR (unrelated) non violent.

If we release all drug possession, what ratio would it be compared to W. Europe? Would the highest still be orders of magnitude higher?

--

I'm saying ending the War on Drugs would release drug possession AND traffickers AND a large percentage of violent crime would just not happen.

This is just one example. Criminal justice isn't my thing, but then there are a myriad things you can do to prevent recidivism. For instance, the barrier to participate in the regular economy as a convicted felon is absurdly high and, although I haven't statistics to quote for you, I would bet is a huge part of the reason so many people revert to crime (like, oh I don't know, dealing drugs again).

It's about the economics! Incentives matter! Etc.

It sounds to me like you may be twisting the plain language of his statement. "If every non-violent offender was released" we'd be releasing a huge number of people who by any reasonable metric should be in prison. The "non-violent crimes" include burglary, grand larceny, fraud, vehicular manslaughter (yep!), "promoting an obscene sexual performance by a child", and conspiracy.

And yet, even if you release all those people, along with (obviously) all the drug offenders --- every drug offense is statutorily a non-violent crime --- you still have an incarceration problem.

You see his point, right? I'm confused about why you're trying to avoid engaging with it. He's not saying we don't have an incarceration problem; he's saying, "the drug war isn't the problem, because even after you factor it out, we still have an incarceration problem". According to Devin, this is apparent in plain, simple numbers. If I was making an argument that contradicted the basic statistics of the problem, I'd want to know.

I assume Devin is bokonist?

I ignored his statistics because he was using an appeal to emotion with "residents were begging the police". I have now looked them up; he's not wrong - you could halve the incarceration rate and still put twice as many people in jail as in England.

I don't have an answer for that!

I suspect it has to do with a lack of leniency and a prison system set up for punishment and not rehabilitation - the problem behind that incarceration statistic are repeat offenders and long sentences. The TAL episode I linked above really digs into it. Incarceration rates have skyrocketed since 1980.

That said, reducing the prison population by half doesn't strike me as a half measure.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rat...

Finally, his end conclusion is still spurious - if you lock up more people than everyone else clearly law enforcement isn't the problem.

Sorry, his conclusion may be wrong, but it's simply not spurious.

If you release all the nonviolent offenders, what you're left with are the violent offenders, which is a convenient shorthand for "people who clearly should be in prison".

Conclusion: how ever much we may be over-incarcerating drug offenders, it is also the case that too many people are committing violent crimes.

Devin's hypothesis is that this is a result of half-hearted law enforcement: we have enough enforcement to lock up huge numbers of people, but not enough to make the risk of committing any one violent crime high enough to deter crime.

I wish we could stop discussing this from the premise of "it's controversial whether we should stop locking people up for drug possession". Nobody in this discussion appears to believe that at all. We should get past that point.

>I wish we could stop discussing this from the premise of "it's controversial whether we should stop locking people up for drug possession".

I haven't been arguing about that all.

At the root of it, I have a hypothesis that a majority of violent crime in our present society stems from some kind of inter-institutional fracas, i.e. people committing violence do so, for the most part, as an attempt to further the goals of the social hierarchy to which they belong.

On a parallel level, I also believe that barring some seriously draconian shit, ala Singaporean death penalties, in a lot if not most communities we have basically reached peak law enforcement. (It's worth debating just what is "seriously draconian", though). We basically can't stop people from engaging in ludicrously profitable or enjoyable illegal activities, and at a micro level we can't stop dedicated individuals who want to hurt other individuals.

Given these two beliefs, I think your best bet is to shrink the organizations involved by drastically eliminating their profit margins on their most lucrative trade. (As a side tangent, also engage in more expensive deep independent investigations as done in the Wire, but as the Wire shows there are many institutional challenges with that approach also).

As it turns out, it's a complex question. What might be true for inner cities might not apply for port cities where you can make a dime doing something else illegal.

"Finally, his end conclusion is still spurious - if you lock up more people than everyone else clearly law enforcement isn't the problem."

Not true at all. The way to measure how lax law enforcement is is by what percent of crimes result in punishment. The U.S. has a very low clearance rate compared to other countries ( http://sowf.moi.gov.tw/stat/english/enational/j54.xls ). I don't have the stats on hand, but the conviction rate is also much lower. In many cities have about a 60% clearance rate (meaning an arrest with a warrant) and then about a 30% conviction rate for homicide (http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2010-08-30/news/bs-ed-berns... ). In other words, in only 20% of murders is the perpetrator found and convicted for murder. In Japan and Singapore, the rate is in the 90%'s (arguably this rate is suspiciously too high). The U.S. has much less effective law enforcement. Not surprisingly, Japan and Singapore have very, very few murders, so their overall incarceration rate is much lower.

When you look at other crimes it's the same deal. When you talk to people in who live in urban neighborhoods in the U.S. the default expectation is that burglaries, armed robberies, car break ins, etc, etc will not get solved.

As hard as it is to believe, even drug enforcement is quite lax in the U.S. cities. The first dozen times someone is caught on the street corner dealing drugs, they get a day in jail and they are right back out there. And most of the time the police just drive by without doing anything. Think that happens in Singapore? In Sweden? In anywhere in the developed world outside of certain urban cores? Drug policing is incredibly lax. So the problem grows, turf wars break out, fighting breaks out, the population calls for the police to do something, there is a crack down, and all the drug dealers who were suckered into thinking the police didn't care get caught up and end up in prison for a long time.

The problem is that American policing is both too lax and too harsh. The best way to prevent crime is too have predictable, high probability consequences for crime. Harsh but low probability punishment is much less effective.

The type of policing in the Wire (which matches most of what I have read in real life about the problem) is the worst possible way to prevent crime. Remember how the police wait for months and months, watching the gangs, knowing everyone who is committing crimes, without doing a thing about it? That is what I mean by incredibly lax policing. In the 1860's Philadelphia had a gang problem. A certain gang notoriously controlled an area of town and was causing the people all sort of trouble. So the police chief sent in a force billy clubs and beat the gang down. The gang problem disappeared, the gang members did not have some permanent criminal record that prevented employment, it was quick and effective action.

Notice how in the Wire and in real life the police arrest someone for drug dealing, and then are back out on the street with no consequences a few days later. The police shrug it off, as if nothing can be done about it. But why not put every person who has been arrested for drug dealing under anti-loitering probation for the rest of the year. If you're caught loitering at that same corner again, you're told once to move along. Second offence you get 10 hours of community labor, and caught again you get ten lashes with the billy club. Baltimore has no shortage of community labor to be done, lots of trash to pick up and lots to clear out. I guarantee you'll have the streets clear of street dealing in no time. Youth won't fall in the drug gang trap as much and violent turf wars over corners will cease.

And then there is that whole issue of the schools. Again, school discipline is ridiculously lax. The default punishment is sending the kid to the principal's office, the harshest punishment is suspension or expulsion. None of these are even punishments to the types of kids committing the offense! See for example: http://www.anurbanteacherseducation.com/2011/02/tfa-alumnus-... and http://www.city-journal.org/html/13_1_how_i_joined.html neither of these situations is that abnormal.

America is like the abusive parent who mostly let's the kids do whatever they want, and then everyone once in a while gets drunk and beats the kid silly. Naturally the kids grow up to be criminals. What is needed is strict, firm, predictable law enforcement.

There's a very good treatment of these issues in the late Christopher Stuntz's book, The Collapse of American Criminal Justice. Basically he blames a mixture of excessive criminalization/sentencing (eg drug laws), plea bargaining, and lax policing which prefers arresting people for easy-to-convict crimes - not least because law enforcement officers nowadays rarely live in the same communities where crime occurs, and so lack respect from, sensitivity towards, and intelligence about the communities that they police.

If I kill you over a bad drug deal, but none of us has drugs on us at the time, what crime do I get charged with?

The counterpoint offered by phillmv was that just because, on paper, the crime has nothing to do with drugs, doesn't mean that it wasn't motivated by the drug trade.

(1) Murder.

(2) It's likely that many crimes are caused by the black market for drugs; the black market for drugs can be suppressed by legalizing them. It's also likely that many crimes are caused by drugs; these crimes can't be suppressed by legalizing, and in fact may be exacerbated by them. Drug dependency is devastating to economic well-being and to family systems and both those failures also give rise to criminality.

I'm pro-legalization, and if you read his blog Devin seems to be too, but if legalizing is a pipe-dream solution to the "incarceration problem", then pointing wildly to it during discussions of the incarceration problem does everyone a disservice.

Legalizing drugs is not a short-term solution to the incarceration problem. As bokonist pointed out (and you quoted), we'd still have record-high incarceration rates if everyone with a drug-related offense was released.

However, the idea behind legalization is that it would reduce the incentive to commit other crimes, and that in the long-term, fewer people would be incarcerated, and so the incarceration rates would drop over time.

I agree though that it is both a pipe-dream (unlike alcohol prohibition, drug prohibition is pretty popular) and a "magic bullet" (in that it sounds too good to be true, and thus probably is).

There are many other causes of our high incarceration rates, but legalization is an important step in the right direction (in recognizing that we have created the wrong legal incentives).

Like I hypothesized: some (maybe most) of the crimes involved in drug trafficking can be mitigated by legalization. But many of the crimes that knock-on from drug use are simply endemic from drug use. That intensive use of hard drugs destroys families and employability isn't simply a result of illegality.

"I'm pro-legalization, and if you read his blog Devin seems to be too, but if legalizing is a pipe-dream solution to the "incarceration problem", then pointing wildly to it during discussions of the incarceration problem does everyone a disservice."

My blog post on the topic is here: http://intellectual-detox.com/the-case-for-legalizing-drugs/

That said, I think legalization is much less of a pipe dream than any of the solutions I'm proposing. Which is unfortunate, because I don't think legalization alone will do much of anything about crime, I think most of the major cities need a period of fairly draconian and strict law enforcement to bring back from essentially a state of civil war back to civilization.

> these crimes can't be suppressed by legalizing, and in fact may be exacerbated by them.

Since we're all pro-legalization, then this is a little funny thing to be arguing about but I have a straight forward counter argument to the above.

There is a certain percentage of people who are straight up ruined by addiction. But they're a) a very small percentage of the population and b) since almost everyone has access to drugs (and at least in some of my social circles consuming drugs is totally normative) almost everyone who can be ruined by addiction already is.

This is bourne out by the experience of Portugal, which has decriminalized all drugs, etc etc yadda yadda.

Violent crime in Portugal has been rising steadily. Even if it had simply held steady after decriminalization (which seems not to be the case), that would still refute the idea that legalization is a good way to stanch the rate of incarceration.

Alas, it gets complicated to isolate variables when you consider the whole economic meltdown they're experiencing. Public policy is hard, let's go programming!

Control for economic conditions, and then you may have a case. Policy matters like this are a tricky.

We don't have enough countries to control for economic conditions, culture, form of government, etc, etc.

I wonder: From what I understand, cigarettes are more strongly addictive than many "hard drugs", so do they give rise to many criminal acts? If we're just looking at the dependency factor and not the direct effects of the drug (e.g. "that stuff makes you violent"), it seems like it ought to be a useful model.

No. Intensive addiction to cigarettes doesn't destroy your career or your family --- at least, not until later in your life, when you contract lung cancer. In fact, from experience: smoking can improve your earning potential, by creating the additional networking opportunity of being a member of the community of smokers. The cost of smoking is mostly constant and manageable.

Intensive addiction to heroin is virtually guaranteed to destroy both your family and your career, leaving you and your dependents with neither an income nor a support system.

I think his point is that intensive addiction is more likely with cigarettes - the high from smoking tobacco is much less intense than that from many illegal drugs, but the high and the addiction potential are different things. You are quite right that intensive addiction to some drug like heroin can be worse, but part of the problem in the US is that being a heroin addict is almost de facto proof of criminality. While attempts to criminalize addiction itself have failed, if you are a police officer and you know someone is a heroin addict then you won't need to wait very long to bust the person for possession. On the other hand, if you become addicted to heroin in some other countries this will be treated as a medical problem and you may be able to manage your consumption in a clinical context at lower expense, social risk and so on.