IT'S TIME FOR A SERIOUS REEVALUATION OF SOCIAL COSTS OF OUR WAR ON DRUGS

American taxpayers spend an inordinate amount of money keeping fellow
citizens locked up. And thanks in large part to a failed "War on Drugs," the
amount they spend just keeps growing.

States and the federal government kept 2.1 million inmates behind bars in
2002, according to a report released Sunday by the Bureau of Justice
Statistics. The prison population increased by 2.6 percent between 2001 and
2002, according to the report. The cost to keep all those people locked up:
an estimated $40 billion dollars.

At the end of 2002, about one of every 143 U.S. residents was in federal,
state or local custody. That's an unbelievably large percentage of the
population. But what's truly appalling is that 10 percent of
African-American men between the ages of 25 and 29 were incarcerated last
year, compared to 1.2 percent of white men and 2.4 percent of Hispanic men.
Something is badly wrong.

The Reagan administration launched the war on drugs in the early 1980s.
Politicians of every stripe jumped on the bandwagon in the following years.
Many saw ratcheting up penalties for drug offenders as an easy way to make
points with the voting public.

But the result has not been fewer illegal drugs. If anything, it's been
fewer resources devoted to other crime problems.

Harsh drug laws passed with the intent of sending major traffickers, such as
importers and high-level suppliers, to prison for long periods of time have
mostly been applied to street-level dealers, doing virtually nothing to stem
the flow of drugs, but taking a tremendous toll in social costs. Not only
must taxpayers foot the bill to keep the offenders in prison, any dependant
children are left without at least one of their parents and often also need
government assistance.

In 1980 there were 19,000 offenders in state prisons for drug offenses and
4,900 in federal prisons, representing 6 percent and 25 percent of all
inmates respectively, according to The Sentencing Project, a non-profit
devoted to developing alternative sentencing programs and to research and
advocacy on criminal justice policy. By 1999, the number of drug offenders
in state prisons had increased more than 12-fold, to 252,200, and they
represented 21 percent of the inmate population. In federal prisons, the
number of drug offenders had risen to 68,360 and represented 57 percent of
all inmates.

Drug laws that discriminate between crack and powder cocaine, dispensing far
harsher penalties for the cheaper crack variety, disproportionately target
poor and minority users and are one of the major factors in the huge
disparity in the number of young African-American men in prison.

It's long past time we demanded that our lawmakers reevaluate the social
costs of the war on drugs. Building more prisons at a cost of about $100,000
per cell is not the answer.

In "Does Getting Tough on Crime Pay?", published by the Urban Institute, a
nonpartisan economic and social policy research organization, the authors
write: "For drug crimes ... there is no evidence that the increased use of
imprisonment has produced measurable reductions. Imprisonment for drug
crimes is not a cost-effective sanction compared to treatment or
intermediate sanctions, and its overuse for lower level drug offenders
represents a misallocation of scarce prison resources.

"Finally, the massive increases in incarceration that resulted from the
reforms have been distributed unevenly throughout the population. In
particular, there has been a geographical clustering of incarceration. In
most states, the vast majority of persons admitted into prisons,
particularly for drug crimes, have come from a comparatively few large urban
areas within the states. Within many of these areas, in a single year,
almost 4 percent of the young black men between the ages of 16 and 34 were
removed into prison. This rate exceeded those of comparably aged white men
by seven to 10 times. The exceedingly high removal rate may contribute to
family disruption and social organization of communities, thereby
contributing to crime problems. This is especially the case in black,
inner-city communities."

An analysis quoted by The Sentencing Project concluded that spending $1
million to expand the use of mandatory sentencing for drug offenders would
reduce drug consumption nationally by 13 kilograms. Spending the same amount
on treatment would reduce consumption almost eight times as much, or 100
kilograms. The analysis also estimated that the use of treatment would
reduce drug-related crime by up to 15 times as much as mandatory sentencing.

In the end, what all of this means is that federal and state drug laws are
unfair, expensive, ineffective and in many cases, actually contribute to
greater societal problems than those they are intended to address.

Mandatory prison sentences for non-violent drug offenses should be repealed.
The emphasis should be placed on treatment instead of incarceration. Early
intervention is key. The first time a person lands in the court system on a
drug offense, a thorough evaluation should be done and an aggressive effort
should be made to see that the offender gets treatment and/or job training,
as needed.

Incarcerating non-violent offenders should be an absolute last resort.

On the Net: http://www.urban.org/

http://www.sentencingproject.org/

http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs