AMERICA'S GULAG JUST KEEPS GROWING

We're No. 1! We're No. 1! The New York Times' Adam Liptak wrote a
disturbing front-page story on Wednesday about how the United States
dwarfs the rest of the world when it comes to locking up its citizens.
The United States has less than 5 percent of the world's population,
but a quarter of the world's prisoners. There are now 2.3 million
people behind bars in the United States. According to the Justice
Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics' most recent report, the
number of people incarcerated in U.S. prisons and jails jumped by more
than 60,000 in the year ending June 30, 2006. That jump represents the
largest increase since 2000.

The United States continues to rank first among all nations in both
total prison/jail population and per capita incarceration rates. The
United States has held first place for decades, followed by China
(with more than four times our population) at 1.6 million and Russia
at 885,670, according to the International Centre for Prison Studies
at King's College in London.

America's prison population explosion is fed in good part by the
failed drug war policies of the past 30-plus years. Back in 1980,
around 50,000 people were incarcerated for drug law violations. The
total is now roughly 500,000. And this number does not even include
hundreds of thousands of parolees and probationers who are
incarcerated for technical violations, such as a drug relapse, nor
does it include nondrug offenses committed under the influence of
drugs, or to support a drug habit, or crimes of violence committed by
drug sellers.

The Liptak piece describes criminologists and legal scholars in other
industrialized countries as being mystified and appalled by the number
of Americans incarcerated and length of the prison sentences. "The
U.S. pursues the war on drugs with an ignorant fanaticism," said
Vivian Stern, a research fellow at the Centre for Prison Studies at
King's College in London. In the past Europeans came to America to
study the prison system, but now they look at U.S. policies to see
what not to do.

Two powerful forces are at play today. On the one hand, public opinion
strongly supports alternatives to incarceration for nonviolent and
especially low-level drug law violators -- and state legislatures
around the country are beginning to follow suit. The paramount example
to date is Prop. 36, the Californian "treatment instead of
incarceration" ballot initiative in 2000 that won with 61 percent of
the vote notwithstanding the opposition of political and law
enforcement officials. On the other hand, the prison-industrial
complex has become a powerful force in American society, able to make
the most of the political inertia that sustains knee-jerk, lock-'em-up
policies. There are some prosecutors quoted in the Times story who try
to spin the draconian sentences as the byproduct of democracy: that
elected officials are just responding to their constituents' desire to
lock up the bad guys and throw away the keys. There's no doubt some
truth in this, but far more insidious is how many politicians exploit
fears about drugs to make themselves look "tough on crime."

Voters should be outraged that their tax money continues to be wasted
on failed drug war policies. It's time for a change.

Despite hundreds of billions of dollars spent and millions of
Americans incarcerated, illegal drugs remain cheap, potent and widely
available in every community; and the harms associated with them --
addiction, overdose, and the spread of HIV/AIDS and hepatitis --
continue to mount. Meanwhile, the war on drugs has created new
problems of its own, including rampant racial disparities in the
criminal justice system, broken families, increased poverty, unchecked
federal power and eroded civil liberties. Our elected officials need
new metrics to determine whether progress is being made.

It's time for a new bottom line for U.S. drug policy -- one that
focuses on reducing the cumulative death, disease, crime and suffering
associated with both drug misuse and drug prohibition. A good start
would be enacting short- and long-term national goals for reducing the
problems associated with both drugs and the war on drugs. Such goals
should include reducing social problems like drug addiction, overdose
deaths, the spread of HIV/AIDS from injection drug use, racial
disparities in the criminal justice system, and the enormous number of
nonviolent offenders behind bars. Federal drug agencies should be
judged -- and funded -- according to their ability to meet these goals.