(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.