A RECORD POLITICIANS AREN'T TALKING ABOUT

This month the nation will mark two paradoxical milestones. The
economic expansion has becomes the longest in history and the prison
population will reach 2 million.

Because economic vitality tends to dampen criminal behavior, those
disparate benchmarks seem to confound conventional wisdom. Why are the
jails filling up while the economy is roaring along? The answer is
four words: the war on drugs.

According to a recent report by the Justice Policy Institute, the U.S.
prison and jail population will top 2 million for the first time by
Feb. 15. With that astounding total, this country has amassed the
largest prison population, as well as the highest incarceration rate,
on Earth. With just 5 percent of the world's population, the U.S. has
a quarter of the world's prisoners.

The report noted that the decade of the 1990s witnessed the largest
spurt of imprisonment in U.S. history. The rate of prison growth
during that decade was nearly 30 times the average rate of increase
for any decade prior to the 1970s, and drug offenses accounted for a
significant amount of that increase.

While we hear plenty of chest-thumping rhetoric about the record
economic expansion, our dubious distinction as the world's leading
jailer is seldom a topic of public discussion. This nation's enormous
incarceration rate is a social catastrophe that should be a major
focus of our political discourse. But it is a stealth issue, even in a
national political campaign. All the presidential candidates--Democrats
as well as Republicans--have been fairly silent on the issue, except
to strenuously downplay their own past drug use.

On the federal level, U.S. leadership has opted for the ostrich
approach. The Republicans are afraid to differ from the military
mind-set made famous by the sainted Ronald Reagan, who officially
launched the drug war in 1982. That war brought increased funding for
drug law enforcement and prompted a surge of inmates and drug
offenders that continues to accelerate. When Reagan took office, the
prison population was about 500,000. It has quadrupled since then and
a high percentage of that increase is drug-related.

Democrats, who purport to favor a less punitive approach, have done
little to bring relief to the incredible incarceration epidemic
plaguing the nation. In fact, it was President Clinton who oversaw the
record increases in prison inmates during the 1990s. What's more, the
latest FBI data revealed that the number of marijuana arrests also hit
a record high during the tenure of the president who didn't inhale.
Most drug arrests are for marijuana possession.

Rather than burst the bubble of pretense that surrounds the idiotic
drug war, national politicians prefer to push their heads even further
into the sand. But discontent about this war's casualties is growing
at state and local levels. Not only have voters in seven states and
Washington, D.C., passed initiatives supporting the medical use of
marijuana, efforts also are under way in many cities and some states
to provide drug treatment as alternatives to prison.

Surprisingly, the politicians who have most publicly defied drug war
propaganda have been Republicans. U.S. Rep. Thomas Campbell, the
California Republican who is the likely nominee in this year's Senate
race, has urged reform of Draconian drug laws that have fueled record
spending for corrections while inhibiting funding for education in his
state. California is not alone. The Justice Policy Institute study
notes that in the last two decades, state spending on corrections
across the country increased by nearly 100 percent, while spending on
higher education decreased by 6 percent.

Gary Johnson, the GOP governor of New Mexico, also has made some
strong statements condemning the drug war. He argues that the costly
campaign against drugs has left courts and prisons overwhelmed with
people arrested for possessing only small amounts of illegal
substances. "We are spending incredible amounts of our resources on
incarceration, law enforcement and courts," he told The New York
Times. "As an extension of everything I've done in office, I made a
cost-benefit analysis, and this one really stinks." Johnson also
suggests that government decriminalize, even legalize, drugs.

There's little chance that the present group of presidential aspirants
will offer such logical approaches. Rather, we're likely to hear round
after round of simplistic rhetoric as each candidate labors to cast
himself as a patriotic drug warrior.

Controversy about George W. Bush's reported drug use has come and gone
with his evasive "no comment" and the other dwindling number of
candidates either have declared themselves drug virgins or victims of
youthful exuberance.

The latest blow-up concerns reports that Vice President Al Gore was a
regular rather than occasional pot-puffer. Candidate Gore certainly
claims credit for his part in the record expansion that has made the
U.S. an international beacon of economic success.

Shouldn't he also take some credit for a prison population that is the
shame of the world?