STATS WE'RE NOT PROUD OF

Tuesday, August 27, 2002 - We take little comfort that 6.6 million (or 1 in
32) adult Americans was either in prison or under supervision by the end of
last year - it's not the sort of record we'd brag about.

From one perspective, the figures could be considered proof of the
efficacy of law enforcement. Viewed another way, though, the fact that
147,700 more adults came under the purview of the criminal justice system
in 2001 is a dismaying indicator that our society does, indeed, suffer from
a complex malaise that defies explanation. Few decades have been as
prosperous as the last one, and never in history have so many Americans
been so well-educated.

(Hold on to your hats, folks: The statistics don't yet reflect the social
costs of the current economic downturn.)

According to a U.S. Department of Justice report, the total of 6.6 million
adults is up 2.3 percent from the previous year and up substantially from
4.4 million in 1990.

Of the most recent total, 4 million were on probation or parole, up 2.8
percent from 2000. There was a bright spot of sorts: The nation's prison
population grew by 1.1 percent to 1.3 million, the smallest annual increase
in nearly three decades.

In Colorado, 57,000 people are in prison; 84,400 are on probation, and
26,600 are on parole. Of that total, 22.8 percent of those in prison or on
parole were convicted of drug offenses.

While murder and other violent crimes have declined nationwide, the
percentage of drug offenses has grown sharply. Nationally, about 24 percent
of all criminal convictions are for drug offenses, compared with less than
10 percent in 1980. Moreover, according to an Urban Institute report, 85
percent of drug offenders have no history of prior imprisonment for violent
crimes.

On the federal level, Bureau of Prisons data show that the percentage of
drug offenders grew from 16.3 percent of the 20,686 sentenced in 1970 to
55.5 percent of the 120,827 federal offenders through last October. It's a
no-brainer that the War on Drugs plainly has swollen the nation's prison
population, but now some states, such as California, are beginning to treat
drug use in a more intelligent fashion, requiring treatment rather than
incarceration of non-violent offenders.

It's time for lawmakers at the federal and state level to seriously
re-examine drug use and abuse: More and more Americans have come to view
the seemingly endless War on Drugs as nothing more than most recent
incarnation of the disastrous Prohibition experiment.

Until more enlightened approaches to the drug problem evolve, the prison
populations and numbers of Americans under criminal justice supervision
have nowhere to go but up.