Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

> The US could start by no longer jailing drug consumers or first-time low-level street dealers. It just really really doesn't work anyway. That would reduce the prison population by what? 2/3? Suddenly you have 3x the budget and space, which should allow for quite a few improvements.

Nothing like that: https://www.google.com/amp/s/fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/rel.... Releasing every prisoner with a drug crime as their most serious offense would reduce the prison population by 14%. (Almost all that is low level dealers--few people are in prison for mere possession.)

It would be a good step, but people overestimate how big an impact it would have.

View on HN

14% is huge, especially considering how many people commit crime because their life was destroyed by a drug conviction (their own or their parent's) leading to further crime.

John Pfaff studies this at Fordham and also rebuts this variant of the argument: if you look, there's no strong correlation between people ever convicted of any drug crime and later sentencing.

(His book, _Locked In_, is pretty great).

Reminder: nobody, including Pfaff, is saying it's good we lock up drug offenders like this. It's bad, and we should stop. It's just not a solution to mass incarceration. To address that, we need an across-the-board fix for aggressive prosecution, which is what appears to be the most important factor ratcheting up prison populations.

How many people?

I would guess that 14% underestimates the impact of not locking people up for drug crimes in the first place.

Rationale: there likely are quite a few prisoners who were initially were convicted on a minor drug crime, couldn't find work afterwards, then turned to theft or robbery, and now are emprisoned for a crime that's more serious than a drugs crime.

I also think one should look at people locked up for having intercourse with minors in those cases where the criminal is just over age and the minor is just under age. Even assuming that needs punishment, the repercussions for one's life are to harsh.

Thanks! I'm really off by quite a bit...

It's complex, and you're right to a first approximation. People (like GP poster) greatly overestimate the proportion of prisoners who could be easily and immediately released if the War on Drugs was ended.

On the 'could be greater than 14% side" you'd also want to know how many people are losing day release/probation/parole for dirty urine; even non-drug parolees and probationers might be tested.

Probably the other palatable change that would reduce incarceration rates would be to stop using jails as de facto asylums.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com