Today's installment brought to us by the New York Times' columnist David Brooks. Brooks takes on the issue of mass-incarceration and determines that the War on Drugs is not the problem:
While I don't dispute the number and I do believe people emphasize non-violent drug offenders too much, Brooks might be surprised to learn that drug possession and drug sales is just one part of the legal problems created by the War on Drugs. A good rule for drawing conclusions from data, should be that the data needs to matter.The drug war is not even close to being the primary driver behind the sharp rise in incarceration. About 90 percent of America’s prisoners are held in state institutions. Only 17 percent of these inmates are in for a drug-related offense, or less than one in five.Moreover, the share of people imprisoned for drug offenses is dropping sharply, down by 22 percent between 2006 and 2011. Writing in Slate, Leon Neyfakh emphasized that if you released every drug offender from state prison today, you’d reduce the population only to 1.2 million from 1.5 million.
