It’s Not Just the Drug War (2015)

Sounds plausible to me! Someone, please crunch the numbers/do more research. :-/

Do the people on the receiving end of drug related violence consistently report it to the police?

I sort of think not. And most violent crime isn't murder (which police will tend to investigate if there is a body, so less dependence on reporting there).

I don't think that the interviewee would dispute the role of the war on drugs in creating the problem. If you look at the text, the stronger statements minimizing the war on drugs are all made by the interviewer.

The point the interviewee is trying to make is that the debate is to focused on releasing non-violent drug offenders and ignores the bigger context and other solutions.

In addition to ending the war drugs, the interviewee is advocating:

> If you care about reentry and about keeping people out of prison in the first place, there’s no public policy that you should support more strongly now than Medicaid expansion. Medicaid expansion gives states huge infusions of federal money to expand mental health services, substance abuse treatment, and medical care for many of the people who are most likely to end up in prison.

And:

> We need comprehensive sentencing reform, and not just for drug crimes. We have to look at the hard cases like child pornography. We also need to roll back these very punitive sentences for people who’ve committed some pretty serious crimes — like homicide

>And this giant market, of course, lives almost entirely outside the civil justice system or any other mechanism for peaceful resolution of disputes.

It's not just people in the drug trade who don't have access to the civil justice system for peaceful resolution of disputes; anyone who's lower than upper-middle-class is priced out of the justice system by the insanely high fees and lawyer costs involved.

Beyond ignoring the side effects of prohibition and all the crime it creates one thing about the article I found eyebrow-raising was the dismissive tone they took towards ending the drug war. It's only 20% of the incarcerated population. Ending it would ONLY save the lives of millions of innocent Americans.

It's definitely not the whole story, not even the majority, but 20% is ENORMOUSLY significant. And the most crucial thing is that it's a no-brainer. It's easy. It is the first of many steps, but it's the first and that's important in a way I think the article misses. If we can't convince the electorate to stop brutalizing innocent people who prefer safer and healthier alternatives to alcohol in the privacy of their own home, for example, how will we ever get to the point where we can consider releasing a serial drunk driver before 20 years of being beaten and raped and humiliated?

The biggest change the drug war has made is to the law enforcement apparatus. It has given law enforcement unlimited power because it has turned everyone into a criminal: drugs are ubiquitous, especially in poorer communities, and proving that someone possesses something is MUCH easier than proving someone has done something in court. When everyone's a criminal and it's easy to prosecute all of a sudden you get enormous power concentrated in the hands of LEOs and prosecutors, it's all about who they choose to exact punishment upon. Prosecutors will get lazy and instead of going after someone for a real crime, use the drugs to force them into a plea and call it a day. It's quick, cost effective, and serves some sense of justice -- you get the person you've decided is the "bad guy". Getting rid of the war on drugs would stop this, so prosecutors would have to drop cases or prosecute real crimes, which I'd imagine would lead simultaneously to more prosecutions of those problem crimes with huge sentences mentioned in the article and fewer convictions. It's another factor.

It was also a surprise, to me at least, that even if you released all of the people in jail for drug offenses, it would really only affect certain black demographics. That's something I hadn't realized. Basically a HUGE affect on the number of blacks in prison, but almost no affect on the number of whites and latinos in prison. And whites and latinos are overrepresented in the prison population in a relatively draconian way compared to Europe. (Just not as overrepresented as blacks. I'm assuming because of the asymmetry in enforcement of drug laws.)

So we are using these sentencing laws to send EVERYONE to prison for a long time, regardless of the crime. It makes me wonder how many crimes actually land you in prison? Probably some things I don't even know about will put you there.

Problem is the article is entirely wrong to be dismissive of the effects of the drug war. The author says that prisons aren't full of low level drug offenders, and I believe them. But that doesn't mean it's not full of people who • violently assaulted a user who stole or didn't pay for drugs. • violently assaulted a dealer in order to steal their drugs and or cash. • murdered someone they believed was cooperating with the police and implicating them in drug trafficking. • sold drugs while being armed with illegal weapons in order to protect themselves and their illegal business. • etc.

The entire premise of the article is wrong, rendering it moot.

Being a prosecutor is also a stepping stone for politicians. Which makes selecting for smart ambitious cruel assholes even worse.

> Perhaps it would be better to force the state's criminal-court attorneys to spend equal time as prosecutors and as public defenders

That's a brilliant idea.

What better way to find systematic holes in the system than by making the same people fight against them half the time, and making their reviews based on an equal amount of prosecution and defense? Even if we still just went by the numbers (which we would, it's easy) at least it wouldn't be so one-sided.

We have a lot of public infrastructure which needs love (i.e. construction); but of course the money to do this isn't there in the first place.

> "...race liberals ran roughshod over deep concerns expressed by other liberals and some experts on crime and punishment that the quest for more proceduralism untethered to substantive goals in criminal justice would yield a more punitive criminal justice system"

Outside the actual meaning intended for 'race liberals' it does seem like a case of labelling with the intent to paint a non-neutral narrative. The 'race liberals' ran roughshod. The other liberals concerns were deep, and supported by experts, and the proceduralism was apparently not tethered to any goals.

This paragraph at least seems more fiction than non-fiction.

It's a similar construction to "fiscal conservative" or "social liberal", i.e. in this case people who had liberal views on racial issues in the 1940s-70s debate over the civil-rights movement. I think this particular phrase is a bit idiosyncratic to Gottschalk, though. It's intended to give her a concise phrase that includes social liberals, conservatives who had liberal views on civil rights (common among northern conservatives at the time), etc., rather than having to constantly repeat a construction like "those who had liberal views on racial issues".

My interpretation is that they trying to make the point that it's not just the "War on Drugs" that is causing this massive spike in prison population but is instead being driven by increasing penalties across the board, including increasing the number serving life, stated or otherwise, without possibility of parole.

They make this point while acknowledging that the "War on Drugs" does disproportionately affect African Americans and women.

Throughout the article they make several statements that indicate to me they think there should be more discretion allowed on deciding which punitive actions should be taken.

"Brute egalitarianism" means giving everyone the same sentence without case-by-case consideration.

For example zero-tolerance, mandatory sentencing, not doing pardons anymore, not releasing people on parole when they behave well and so on.