Over the course of the next few blogs, I plan to delve in depth on issues that are leading to overcrowding in our prisons and looking at ways to fix them. Specifically, I’ll be looking at drug users and how they contribute to prison overcrowding in this blog post. I’ll examine what history has shown us about drug users and treatment, how much of an impact they have on the prison population, if these drug laws have had a drastic effect on females in prison, and if we should imprison them.
Unfortunately, this is not the first time we’ve been down the beaten path with draconian drug laws. In the 1950s we started instituting mandatory minimum sentences for drug crime and surprisingly these laws were still in effect when the 1960s happened. The 1960s are synonymous with drug culture, yet at this time, there existed stiff penalties for possessing drugs. Under one of the biggest expansions of drug culture to date, we had these stiff penalties, suggesting that they were not accomplishing the intent of decreasing drug use.
A commission set up by President Kennedy recommended rehabilitation over imprisonment, stating that rehabilitation of the individual should be the intended result (Gill, 2008). This commission also found that stiff penalties and sentences were not very effective at all stating “persistence of narcotics abuse, despite severe penalties for the possession of narcotics abuse, is persuasive evidence that the abuser will risk a long sentence to get his drug” (Gill, 2008). We knew this back in the 1960s, so why are we repeating our mistakes well into 21st century?
Drug users now occupy large amounts of both federal and state prisons. 55% of those serving time in Federal Prisons are there on drug offenses, with 11% being there for violent offenses (Sentencing Project). The majority of these drug offenders in federal prison were primarily low-level drug offenders (Gross, 2008). Gross found that “by 1998, 40% of all federal sentencing was for drug crimes, and federal prisons saw more than a 400% increase in the number of inmates sentenced on drug convictions.” (2008). State prisons, according to Sabol, West & Cooper, housed 1,331,100 prisoners in 2006, with 265,800 of those being drug offenders. Another interesting statistic according to Gross “between 1986 and 1991, drug offenders accounted for 44% of the increase in the state prison population” (2008). As we can see, drug offenses and our sentencing practices based on them have clearly had a drastic impact on our prison population.
Risley (2007) makes a good point when she questions our methodology of imprisoning drug users. She states “It's not like you can't get drugs in prison. You can get drugs anywhere, in any prison in this country. As long as there is one remaining orifice on the human body, it is impossible to stop the flow of drugs. The ingenuity of a desperate addict is quite amazing.” We need to realize that hard time is not a way to cure an addiction. Why put these addicts through a revolving door that quite simply does not seem to be working?
Consider that these previous figures do not take into account females doing time for drug offenses. The war on drugs has had an even more radical impact on women in prison than men, where the amount of women in prison increased by 420% from 1986 to 1996. Which incidentally resulted in 70% of the female prison population being low level drug and nonviolent offenders (Gross, 2008). Currently, we have 114,000 females in prison, which does not include those in jail (Sabol, West & Cooper). How many mothers have we taken off the streets to these draconian drug laws from the war on drugs? Has it made any difference? If our goal is to simply get these nonviolent drug users off the streets, I suppose you could say it has. If our goal was to keep them off the streets, however, then we should be sending them to rehabilitation, not incarcerating them.
Ultimately, America needs to decide what it wants to do as a nation in regards to these drug offenders. Do we want to help cure their addictions and get them back to being productive members of society? Or do we want to lock them up and throw away the key for their transgressions? Prison is no cure for an addict; we either commit to rehabilitation or accept the fact that these drug users will be in and out of prison for the rest of their lives.
Gross, Bruce. (2008). Mandatory Minimums. Forensic Examiner, 17(3), 64-69
Gill, Molly M (2008). Correcting Course: Lessons from the 1970 Repeal of Mandatory Minimums. Federal Sentencing Reporter, 21(1), 55-67
Risley, Cristini http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michealene-cristini-risley/changing-our-prison-syste_b_75893.html
Sabol, West and Cooper, http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/pdf/p08.pdf
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