Drug War

Via Balloon Juice, I learned that a site called Stop the Drug War said: "More than half a million people were behind bars for drug offenses in the United States at the end of last year, according to numbers from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. In a report released Sunday, Prisoners in 2004, the Justice Department number-crunchers found that people sentenced for drug crimes accounted for 21% of state prisoners and 55% of all federal prisoners."
Ah the myth of prisons crowded by pot smokers continues.
So what are the real numbers? More than 1 in 10 of the nation's criminal are in prison for murder -- 148,300 all told. Let's all agree that if you murder someone, you go to prison.
Indeed, 624,900 of the nation's 1,237,500 felons behind bars committed violent crimes. Another 253,000 committed property crimes.
That leaves 265,000 drug offenders. That is less than 1 in every 1,000 Americans. Hardly common practice.
Stop the Drug War plays with the numbers: "Even as violent and property crime rates have declined, drug arrests have continued to climb, reaching more than 1.7 million last year. The consequences of those arrests show up in the ever-increasing drug war prisoner numbers."
But an arrest is not the same as a sentencing. It seems that less than a quarter of the arrestees wind up in jail. (1.7 million arrested in a year and only 265,000 in prison for all years). Seems to me we are going after the officers in the drug wars and letting the grunts go free.
All in all, 486 of every 100,000 American adults is behind bars. I think most of the 99,514 out of 100,000 who aren't in prison appreciate that we incarcerate so many of our criminals, especially considering that the crime rate is now down to where it was 40 years ago, when we started this Rehabilitation Rubbish.

Linked to Basil's Blog and Don Surber.