Fordham Law Professor John Pfaff’s 2015 article, “The War on Drugs and Prison Growth: Limited Importance, and Limited Legislative Options,” was referenced in this article written by Charles Fain Lehman, in regards to the the Reagan-Bush-Clinton drug war.
Some of the most aggressive criticisms of the Drug War’s implementation are unmerited. Most significantly, critics routinely charge the War on Drugs with being the major cause of America’s uniquely high incarceration rate. The U.S. prison population rose from less than 200,000 in 1970 to over 1.5 million at its peak in the late 2000s. Locking up “low-level, non-violent” drug offenders, it is often claimed, was the major driver of this nearly seven-fold increase. For example, in her oft-cited book The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander declares that “in less than thirty years, the U.S. penal population exploded … with drug convictions accounting for a majority of the increase.”
This is, simply, false. Drug offenders never accounted for a particularly large fraction of the U.S. prison population, peaking at about 22 percent of state prisoners in 1990. (Today the rate is 13 percent.)4 The drug offender share did spike in the early 1980s. But as John Pfaff—a Fordham law professor and ardent critic of mass incarceration—has shown, other categories of offenders grew too, such that drug-related incarceration explains only about 20 percent of the growth in the prison population between 1980 and the population’s peak in 2009. Most of that contribution, furthermore, comes in the 1980s. From 1990 onwards, drug offenses account for only 14% of prison growth, compared to 60% attributable to violent offenders.
Read “What Was The War on Drugs? Part V” on The Causal Fallacy.