Professor John Pfaff was quoted in the Washington Post regarding U.S mass incarceration and the likely consequences of Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s policy shift.
Many people have argued that the “war on drugs” has led to the great increase in the prison population. You argue that this theory doesn’t explain most of the increase. Why not?
At its simplest, it’s just a matter of numbers. Over half of all people in state prison are there for violent crimes, and over half the growth in state prisons since 1980 is due to locking up people for violent offenses. As of 2015, only about 16 percent of those in prison are there for drugs crimes. Of course, it’s true that drug prohibition can cause non-drug crimes, ranging from theft to fund a (more-expensive) habit to murder over a drug deal gone bad, so not everyone in prison as a result of the “war on drugs” is there for a drug crime. But studies suggest that ending the war on drugs would have complicated, off-setting impacts. For example, there would be fewer deaths over drug deals but more murders committed by people while abusing (some but not all) drugs.
There would be no more people arrested for selling drugs — and almost everyone in prison for drugs is there for dealing, not possession — but many of those who currently sell would still struggle to find gainful employment and would thus likely turn to other forms of crime to make ends meet.
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Jeff Sessions has just announced a “tough on crime” order, intended to push prosecutors to seek longer sentences. How consequential is this order going to be, and for whom?
When it comes to federal policy, it’s important to realize that the federal system is fairly small, holding only 12 percent of U.S. prisoners, and federal policies cannot apply to the states. So while Sessions’s new rule may cause an increase in the size of the federal prison (where, unlike the states, about half the inmates are in for drug crimes), its direct impact on the states will be nil, and thus its direct impact on the overall U.S. incarceration will be slight.
More concerning is any sort of “bully pulpit” effect: Will Sessions’s “tough on crime” and Trump’s “carnage in America” rhetoric shape how local county prosecutors use their vast discretion? There’s no rigorous data on this, but my sense from the snippets of data we have is that any such effect will be slight. Prosecutors, as far as I can tell, focus very much on local conditions and local politics, and people’s attitudes towards crime appear to be fairly local. There are a lot of way prison reform can fail or falter in the years ahead, but I don’t think the tough talk coming out of D.C. right now will matter much.