Category Archives: Criminal Justice

The Beginning of the End of the War on Drugs?

Uruguay has legalized pot.

Before the passage of the law, Uruguay’s president made an important point; admitting that legalization was an experiment, he stressed the importance of finding an alternative to the deadly and unsuccessful war on drugs. “We are asking the world to help us with this experience, which will allow the adoption of a social and political experiment to face a serious problem–drug trafficking,” he said. “The effects of drug trafficking are worse than those of the drugs themselves.” 

Yes. That is an “inconvenient truth” that everyone from Milton Friedman to the lowliest academic researcher has documented. Drug abuse (which, interestingly, is nowhere defined in the law, which simply prohibits the use of scheduled substances) is a public health problem, and criminalizing it doesn’t help anyone. It does, however, incentivize the drug trade, erode civil liberties, disproportionately affect the black community and make hypocrites of us all.

If pot were legal, regulated and taxed, we could control children’s access (it is harder in most communities for teens to get alcohol than pot) and generate income.

In Uruguay, the government will actually sell marijuana rather than taxing it. Andrew Sullivan reports that

Under the new law, Uruguayans registered with the government will be allowed to buy up to 40 grams (1.4 ounces) of marijuana from government-licensed pharmacies. Private companies roped in to help produce enough weed to meet local demand will have to sell their crop to the government for distribution. The government will rake in some extra cash in the process. The black market for marijuana is worth some $40 million. The government won’t earn as much; it plans to sell the drug for about $1 a gram, roughly 30 percent less than the black market price. But it can count on a lot of customers: Uruguay has a relatively high percentage of pot smokers for the region – third only to Argentina and Chile.

If Uruguay’s experiment works, there will be increasing pressure to end a “War” that has been one of the costliest failures of public policy in the history of the country. And that’s really saying something, because we have a habit of legislating stupid and costly failures.

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Criminal Justice by the Numbers: The Moneyball Approach

“The approach is simple. First, government needs to figure out what works. Second, government should fund what works. Then, it should stop funding what doesn’t work.”

That, in a nutshell, is Peter Orszag’s summary of a recent, detailed set of recommendations  issued by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU’s law school. He calls it “the Moneyball approach”–going by statistical evidence rather than gut impressions.

The Brennan Center’s proposal, Reforming Funding to Reduce Mass Incarceration, is a plan to link federal grant money to modern criminal justice goals – to use that grant money more strategically– to promote innovative crime-reduction policies nationwide and to reduce crime, incarceration and the costs of both.

The proposal, titled “Success-Oriented Funding,” would change the federal government’s $352 million Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant (JAG) Program, by focusing on the government’s current criteria for determining whether a grant has been successful.  (Fortunately, given the gridlock in Congress, It could be implemented by the DOJ– it wouldn’t require legislation.)

The fundamental premise of the program is that “what gets measured gets done.” If you are measuring the number of arrests, you’ll increase arrests. If you are measuring reductions in crime or recidivism, you’ll get reductions in crime and recidivism.

A blue-ribbon panel including prosecutors and defense lawyers, Republicans and Democrats, academics and officeholders has signed on to the proposal. As Orszag noted in the Forward:

Based on rough calculations, less than $1 out of every $100 of government spending is backed by even the most basic evidence that the money is being spent wisely. With so little performance data, it is impossible to say how many of the programs are effective. The consequences of failing to measure the impact of so many of our government programs — and of sometimes ignoring the data even when we do measure them — go well beyond wasting scarce tax dollars. Every time a young person participates in a program that doesn’t work but could have participated in one that does, that represents a human cost. And failing to do any good is by no means the worst sin possible: Some state and federal dollars flow to programs that actually harm the people who participate in them.

Figuring out what we taxpayers are paying for, and whether what we are paying for works.

Evidence. What a novel idea!

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Crime and the City

Our son Stephen is home from the Big Apple for Thanksgiving. He lives in a spiffy new high-rise on the west side of Manhattan, in a redeveloping neighborhood that I would have been afraid to walk in even ten years ago.

I don’t worry about his living in that neighborhood, however, because crime in New York has fallen steadily over the past couple of decades. You can quibble about the reasons (my son suggests it’s because poor people can no longer afford to live there; defenders of “stop and frisk” say it’s because racial profiling and willingness to ignore the civil liberties of minorities has worked), but whatever the reasons, the bottom line is that New York is 65.4% less dangerous to live in than Indianapolis.

According to Areavibes.com, “in New York, as compared to Indianapolis, IN you are: 40.5% less likely to get robbed, 45.6% less likely to get murdered, 81.8% less likely to get your car stolen.”

Last year, Indianapolis had 11.5 murders per 100,000 people. New York had 6.3. We had 52.2 rapes per 100,000; New York had 13.3. Etcetera.

I seem to recall Greg Ballard running for Mayor on the promise that he would make crime “Job One.”

I hope he’s doing better with whatever Job Two was…..

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We’re Exceptional, All Right

Nicholas Kristof recently reported on the consequences of a Texas drug sweep. He began by asking readers to pretend that they’re the judge:

She’s a 32-year-old mom with a 9-year-old daughter and no prior arrests, but she has been caught up in a drug sweep that has led to 105 arrests in her Texas town. Everyone arrested is black.

There are no drugs found on Jones, but her supposed co-conspirators testify against her in exchange for reduced sentences. The whole case is dubious, but she has been convicted. What’s your sentence?

You have little choice. Given the presumptions of the case, she gets a mandatory minimum sentence of life without the possibility of parole. Jump to today and already Jones has spent 14 years in prison and is expected to die behind bars — for a first offense.

This isn’t, unfortunately, an anomaly. America currently has 3,278 people serving life sentences for nonviolent drug and property crimes. In twenty percent of those cases, it was the person’s first offense.

Welcome to mandatory minimum sentencing.

Welcome to laws that don’t allow judges to judge, to calibrate sentences to the specifics of the case before them. Laws that give frustrated jurists no choice but to impose draconian penalties no matter how outrageously disproportionate or unjust they believe those penalties to be.

Welcome to “getting tough on crime” — and of course, welcome to the War on Drugs.

We’re talking about crimes like possession of a crack pipe. Or acting as a go-between in a drug sale. Or trying to cash a stolen check, or shoplifting. Or sharing LSD at a Grateful Dead concert. The estimated cost of imprisoning these 3,278 people for life–rather than for a more reasonable period, one more proportionate to the crime–is calculated to be 1.78 billion dollars.

Sequester that, Boehner!

As the warden of the Louisiana State Penitentiary said, “I need to keep predators in these big old prisons, not dying old men.”

This is flat-out insane. It is wasteful of lives and money, and appallingly inhumane. If we read about similar practices in another country, we’d condemn that system (and smugly congratulate ourselves for our own moral superiority).

We’re exceptional, all right. And evidently incapable of shame.

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Still the Poster Child for Stupid Policy

The most recent newsletter of the ACLU has a report on the costs of incarceration, including the staggering amounts paid to enforce marijuana prohibition. In 2010, the states spent 3.6 billion dollars and made one pot arrest every 37 seconds. And how did this aggressive enforcement work out? Marijuana use increased.

Think about that next time state governments wail about not having enough money to support public education, pave highways, or provide other necessary services.

As I have noted previously, the nation could save an amount equal to the cuts made by sequestration just by substituting sensible regulations for our disastrous drug war.

Current laws are wildly illogical for all sorts of reasons.

The biggest problem with the War on Drugs is that it is being fought on the wrong battlefield. Drug abuse is a public health issue. Behaviors connected to the use of drugs–driving while impaired, theft to support a habit, etc.–should be addressed by the criminal law, but the mere use of a substance deemed harmful is a health issue, and should be addressed as a health issue.  (Speaking of health, marijuana is actually less harmful to users than tobacco, yet we have wildly different approaches to pot and tobacco use–undoubtedly the result of a much more effective tobacco lobby. According to police officers I know, people who use pot are significantly less likely to become violent than people who abuse alcohol, yet we outlaw pot, but regulate and tax alcohol and tobacco.)

Current laws are financially ruinous. The US spends roughly 60 billion dollars annually on drug prohibition, and we get virtually no bang for those bucks because the “war” is ineffective. We also forgo collection of billions of dollars in potential tax revenues that we would collect if we simply taxed pot like we treat alcohol and tobacco. We waste criminal justice resources that would be better used elsewhere, to treat drug abuse or to deter nonconsensual crimes that actually harm others.

Drug prohibition has focused disproportionately on African-American and Latino neighborhoods, exacerbating racial tensions. Black people are almost four times more likely to be arrested for possession of marijuana than their white neighbors, despite statistics confirming comparable levels of use–and the ACLU reports that the disparity in some counties grows to as much as 30 times!

We’ve lost this war. Not that the War on Drugs has ever been effective; the percentage of Americans who use hard drugs is pretty much the same as it has always been. Pot use has ebbed and flowed over time, providing the only real changes in the numbers. Thirty plus years of research has consistently demonstrated the utter failure of American drug policy, and the error of the premises upon which it has been constructed. (Pot smokers become hard drug users in about the same percentages as milk drinkers do, and we don’t outlaw milk as a “gateway drug.”) The only thing the Drug War has done effectively is ruin the lives of (disproportionately black) teenagers who are imprisoned for non-violent drug crimes.

What is frustrating is the number of policymakers who respond to this mountain of evidence with a renewed enthusiasm for measures that have consistently failed.

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