Pubdate: Thu, 15 Oct 2015
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Copyright: 2015 The Washington Post Company
Contact:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/491
Author: Charles Lane

A BIPARTISAN MARIJUANA MYTH

It seems that no presidential debate this year would be complete 
without denunciations of the drug laws, which, it is alleged, result 
in long prison terms for thousands of people, disproportionately 
African Americans, who are guilty only of low-level offenses, thus 
fueling "mass incarceration."

At the last Republican debate, on Sept. 16, former Hewlett-Packard 
chief executive Carly Fiorina charged that "two-thirds of the people 
in our prisons are there for nonviolent offenses, mostly drug-related."

Apropos of former Florida governor Jeb Bush's admitted youthful 
marijuana use, Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.) observed that "there is at least 
one prominent example on the stage of someone who says they smoked 
pot in high school, and yet the people going to jail for this are 
poor people, often African Americans and often Hispanics, and yet the 
rich kids who use drugs aren't."

When Democrats faced off Tuesday night, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) 
said he is for marijuana legalization, "because I am seeing in this 
country too many lives being destroyed for nonviolent offenses. We 
have a criminal justice system that lets CEOs on Wall Street walk 
away, and yet we are imprisoning or giving jail sentences to young 
people who are smoking marijuana."

"I agree completely with the idea that we have got to stop 
imprisoning people who use marijuana. . . . We have a huge population 
in our prisons for nonviolent, low-level offenses that are primarily 
due to marijuana," the front-running former secretary of state, 
Hillary Clinton, chimed in.

Too bad this bipartisan agreement is contradicted by the evidence. 
Fiorina's numbers, for example, are exaggerated: In 2014, 46 percent 
of all state and federal inmates were in for violent offenses 
(murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault), according to the 
latest Justice Department data. And this is a conservative estimate, 
since the definition of violent offense excludes roughly 30,000 
federal prisoners, about 16 percent of the total, who are doing time 
for weapons violations.

Drug offenders account for only 19.5 percent of the total 
state-federal prison population, most of whom, especially in the 
federal system, were convicted of dealing drugs such as cocaine, 
heroin and meth, not "smoking marijuana."

Undeniably, the population of state prisons (which house the vast 
majority of offenders) grew from 294,000 in 1980 to 1,362,000 in 2009 
- - a stunning 363 percent increase - though it has been on a downward 
trajectory since the latter date.

But only 21 percent of that growth was due to the imprisonment of 
drug offenders, most of which occurred between 1980 and 1989, not 
more recently, according to a review of government data reported by 
Fordham law professor John Pfaff in the Harvard Journal of 
Legislation. More than half of the overall increase was due to 
punishment of violent offenses, not drugs, Pfaff reports.

Reviewing data admittedly drawn mostly from Northern "blue" states, 
Pfaff determined that "the median stay in prison for a drug offender 
is generally about a year," and that "relatively few people appear to 
be in prison on marijuana charges" - fewer still for simple possession.

Given the relatively small share of drug offenders, ending the war on 
drugs would not significantly alter the racial disparity in 
incarceration rates, contrary to the conventional wisdom.

Blacks make up 37.5 percent of all state prisoners, about triple 
their share of the population as a whole, according to the Justice 
Department. If we released all 208,000 people currently in state 
prison on a drug charge, the proportion of African Americans in state 
prison would still be 37 percent.

In short, ending the "war on drugs" is not quite the panacea for mass 
incarceration that politicians imply.

Marijuana legalization could help reduce arrest rates, to be sure; 
and to the extent fewer people get busted for smoking pot, that 
would, indeed, cut down on the resulting undue negative personal and 
social consequences.

Otherwise, the bipartisan consensus in favor of looser drug laws is 
just the latest political free lunch, served up by politicians who 
would rather discuss anything except real public policy tradeoffs.

Republicans and Democrats alike are propounding the crowd-pleasing 
notion that we can have less incarceration - saving the country 
billions of dollars and international shame - without risking an 
increase in violent crime, or other harms.

In truth, if we released all 300,000 drug offenders from state and 
federal prison, the U.S. incarceration rate would still be far higher 
than it was three decades ago, and far higher than the rates of other 
industrial democracies.

The only way to lower it dramatically would be to reduce the 
frequency and duration of imprisonment for violent crimes, while 
continuing to reduce violent crime itself.

If any of the candidates has a plan to do that, he or she should speak up.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom