DECRIMINALIZING POVERTY

America's drug policy aims to reduce illicit drug use by arresting
and incarcerating dealers and, to a lesser extent, users. Whatever
its merits (and there are some), the policy is deeply flawed because
it is unjust. It applies only to the disadvantaged. As such, it
reflects massive deficits in the areas of treatment, education and employment.

Drugs are intensively criminalized among the poor but largely
unregulated among the rich. The pot, coke and ecstasy that enliven
college dorms, soothe the middle-class time bind and ignite the
octane of capitalism on Wall Street are unimpeded by the street
sweep, the prison cell and the parole-mandated urine tests that are
routine in poor neighborhoods.

The drug war is nitro to the ghetto's glycerin. In neighborhoods of
mass unemployment, family breakdown and untreated addiction, punitive
drug policy (and its sibling, the war on crime) has outlawed large
tracts of everyday life. By 2008 one in nine black men younger than
35 was in prison or jail. Among black male dropouts in their mid-30s,
an astonishing 60 percent have served time in state or federal prison.

The reach of the penal system extends beyond the prison population to
families and communities. There are now 2.7 million children with a
parent in prison or jail. There are 1.2 million African-American
children with incarcerated parents (one in nine), and more than half
of those parents were convicted of a drug or other nonviolent offense.

In the absence of any serious effort to improve economic opportunity,
particularly among young men with little schooling, drug control has
become our surrogate social policy. For all the billions spent on
draconian criminalization, addiction remains a scourge of the
disadvantaged in inner cities and small towns, drugs are still
plentiful and the drug trade remains a ready but risky source of
casual employment for low-education men and women with no legitimate
prospects. Though drugs are at the center of an array of serious
social problems in low-income communities, things are made worse by a
dysfunctional policy in which arrest, imprisonment and a criminal
record have become a normal part of life.

The most important lesson policy-makers can take from this historic
failure of social engineering is that the drug problem depends only a
little on the narcotics themselves, and overwhelmingly on the social
and economic context in which they are traded and taken.

Addiction exacts a toll not because the latest drug is more addictive
or more potent than its predecessors but because there is too little
treatment, few family or community supports, and acute economic
insecurity in low-income households. The drug trade-with all its
volatility and violence-is not a mainstay of economic life because of
the ghetto-fabulous drug culture and its promise of conspicuous
wealth. It succeeds because there is no work for men and women who
dropped out of school, who have never held a legitimate job and who
read at an eighth-grade level. America doesn't have a drug problem.
It has a poverty problem.

Change, however, is in the air. The states are broke and are trying
to cut their correctional populations. Parole and probation reforms
are successfully reducing reimprisonment for drug and other
violations. Libertarians on the right and left are finding common
ground on decriminalization. Hard times, it seems, are forcing reform
on a profligate policy.

But policy reform-as salutary as it often is, and like the drug war
before it-risks mistaking symptom for cause. If we only
decriminalize, eliminate mandatory minimums and divert to community
supervision rather than reincarcerate, then untreated addiction will
remain ruinous, and illegal opportunities will continue to offer more
than going straight.

Our best research shows that criminal justice reform must be
buttressed by drug treatment, education and employment. These
measures complement one another. A less punitive drug control regime
acknowledges relapse as a likely stage on the road to recovery.
Keeping people out of prison can carry a steep social cost unless
they're meaningfully occupied. In this context, school and work are
as important for the stability and routine they provide as for the
opportunities they expand.

The drug war made an enemy of the poor. A successful ceasefire must
do more than lift the burden of criminal punishment. It must begin to
restore order and predictability to economic and family life,
reducing vulnerability not just to drugs but to the myriad
insecurities that characterize American poverty.