Jail or Parole for 1 in 32 American Adults

There are an awful lot of Americans in jail.

While 1 out of every 142 Americans is now actually in prison, 1 out of every 32 of us is either in prison or on parole from prison, according to yet another report on Americans behaving badly from the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

This means that 6.7 million adult men and women -- about 3.1 percent of the total U.S. adult population -- are now very non-voluntary members of America's "correctional community."

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics' report Probation and Parole in the United States, 2002, the number of adult persons on probation grew by 63,434 during 2002. Probation is a court-determined period of non-prison supervision served following a conviction. The number of adults on parole increased by 20,808, or 2.8 percent, almost double the 1.5 percent average annual growth since 1995.

Straight Dope by Cecil Adams says America is #1 in incarceration rate and in number of prisoners and that was in 2004. We have been working hard in the last two years to do better. No doubt we have.

What is driving this surge? Drug prohibition. We have seen all this before with alcohol prohibition.

The dry years offer many useful analogies, but their most important lesson is the need to distinguish between the harms that stem from drugs and the harms that arise from outlawing them. The Americans who voted in 1933 to repeal Prohibition differed greatly in their reasons for overturning the system. They almost all agreed, however, that the evils of alcohol consumption had been surpassed by those of trying to surpress it.

Some pointed to Al Capone and rising crime, violence, and corruption; others to the overflowing courts, jails, and prisons, the labeling of tens of millions of Americans as criminals and the consequent broadening disrespect for the law, the dangerous expansions of federal police powers and encroachments on individual liberties, the hundreds of thousands of Americans blinded, paralyzed, and killed by poisonous moon-
shine and industrial alcohol, and the increasing government expenditure devoted to enforcing the Prohibition laws and the billions in forgone tax revenues. Supporters of Prohibition blamed the consumers, and some went so far as to argue that those who violated the laws deserved whatever ills befell them. But by 1933: most Americans blamed Prohibition.

If there is a single message that contemporary anti-prohibitionists seek to drive home, it is that drug prohibition is responsible for much of what Americans identify today as the drug problem. It is not merely a matter of the direct costs--twenty billion dollars spent this year on arresting, prosecuting, and incarcerating drug-law violators. Choked courts and prisons, an incarceration rate higher than that of any other nation in the world, tax dollars diverted from education and health care, law-
enforcement resources diverted from investigating everything from auto theft to savings-and-loan scams-all these are just a few of the costs our current prohibition imposes.

I think the twenty billion figure is low. It is more like $50 bn when federal, state, local, military, Coast Guard, border patrol, rehab services, etc. are added in. Not counting all the collateral damage like stolen car radios etc.

The current Mayor Daley of Chicago has estimated that 85% of the crime in his city is drug related. Even if he is only half right, ending prohibition would take a huge bite out of crime. Just as ending alcohol prohibition in the 30s did.

Here is a very good economic analysis of alcohol prohibition. The author comes to the conclusion that the problems of drug prohibition are similar.

I conclude by discussing current prohibitions against illegal drugs in light of the analysis above. Alcohol and drugs are not identical commodities, nor are alcohol prohibition and current drug prohibitions identical policy regimes; thus, it is possible a priori that the lessons drawn from analysis of alcohol prohibition do not apply to current drug prohibitions. I argue here, however, that the relevant characteristics of alcohol and drugs are sufficiently similar to make the example of alcohol prohibition informative about the effects of drug prohibition, even though certain aspects of the two policy regimes differ in ways that merit attention.

You have to wonder if they still teach alcohol prohibition in school.

Captain's Quarters says Britain is running out of prison space. Carol Herman chimes into the discussion. I add my 2¢.