Your stats are not why people are in jail nor prison. Your stats represent an extremely narrow selection of prisoners meeting the "federal" criteria. Your information is misleading to make it look like most people in jail are due to drug offenses, which is factually untrue.
>best numbers show about 15% of prisoners are in with drug charges.
That's incorrect. The source says ~16% had, as their most serious offence, a drug charge.
So in reality more than 16% are serving time for drug crimes. It seems a bit disingenuous that the statistic is posed like that, especially when considering the cyclical nature of incarceration,"3 strikes" laws, and the cascading violence caused by drug laws.
There are so many complicated variables in this, but one thing that is crucial to point out is that he keeps referring to state prisons, which is intentionally misleading because many many drug offenders end up in federal prisons, where they make up 48.4% (https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen...) of the population. That alone makes a lot of this guy's commentary suspect, and since he didn't even mention race or private prisons as a possible factor it really tanks the smell test on this new theory of his.
> Now demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt, with vast supporting evidence, that most of those people shouldn't have been in prison for the crimes in question.
"Shouldn't have been" is a value judgment; by my values, anyone in prison for a non-violent drug "offense" should not be there.
Just did a quick search, and for federal crimes, looks like the drug-related prison population is a whopping 46% of the total, at just under 70k inmates. Not sure what the violent vs. non-violent breakdown is, but even if the violent ones are 75% of those, 17k people () is still a lot. If we assume that the federal prison population is composed similarly to all the state prisons, that's 250k inmates for non-violent drug crimes.
Yes, I know I made some guesses and assumptions around those numbers, and if anyone has some better figures, I'd be happy to correct myself, but there's 250k people should not be in prison in the US, based on my values.
> The great majority of persons in the United States who are in prison are in prison for offenses other than drug offenses.
I had a quick look for information about this. The first source I found (chosen to avoid introducing bias through cherry-picking) was this one: http://bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/p11.pdf and it says: "Nearly half (48%) of inmates in federal prison were serving time for drug offenses in 2011".
So it turns out that both this and tokenadult's statement are correct -- because the great majority of prisoners in the US are state prisoners rather than federal ones. About 17% of state prisoners are doing time for drug offences.
> Most prisoners have been convicted of a violent crime.
this challenged my conceptions a little bit, while I wasn't blown a way by it, I did expect possession to be a higher percent of the whole. Here are some sources for others who are curious:
At yearend 2019 (the most recent year for which
state prison offense data are available), 58% of all
persons imprisoned by states had been sentenced
for violent offenses (710,800 prisoners) [https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/p20st.pdf page 28]
For the same year, 46,700 people were in prison with the most serious crime being possession. This represents 3.8% of the prison population.
However; the above are statistics for STATE prisons. The federal system seems to be murkier, with 46% (67,000~) of inmates being their for drug related reasons. Unlike state breakdowns, drug crimes are differentiated here. If we assume the breakdown between possession and other charges is the same as state levels (a VERY shaky assumption) we'd expect 10% of the federal system to be related to possession.
Averaging some of these numbers, it seems that even in a 'worst case scenario' roughly 9% of inmates are in for possession, but more realistically we're looking at around 4%.
> Contrary to popular perception, the drug war is not a major factor in incarceration in the US.
46.3% of federal prisoners (nearly 85,000) are imprisoned for drug offenses -- not quite an absolute majority, but nearly triple the next highest category (Weapons, Explosives, and Arson.) [0]
Fairly recently, it was only 17% for state prisons [1], which is still quite significant -- about 1 in 6.
But both of those understate the degree to which the drug war drives imprisonment, because drug crimes (which tend to have a shorter sentence than violent crimes) account for nearly 1/3 of prison admissions, despite accounting for a lower share of total prison population. [1]
> It’s interesting that different sources have different counts.
0 is the government’s current count of people who are in federal prison now solely on a federal simple possession charge.
149 is, per the source cited upthread, the number for Fiscal Year 2021 (not clear from the B.I. article if it is at some point in the fiscal year are total in prison at any point over the fiscal year), and the source indicates that’s been rapidly declining; also, Biden issued 75 commutations and 3 pardons in April this year for nonviolent drug offenses, which may be part of the reason that the number of prisoners on simple marijuana possession charges alone in federal prison now is 0.
> It is not close. Which is what I think most people would predict - that it was not even close.
With the caveat that drug offenses include manufacturing, trafficking, and sales:
Your data is consistent with my claim: I meant the denominator being the prison population, not the entire population. Sweden has about 8600 people in prison so about 37% of their prison population is in there for "drug offenses", whereas in the United States it's less than 1 in 5 per your Prison Policy citation. Obviously if you treat entire population as the denominator, then any comparison of Swedish and American prisons is useless because we incarcerate a much larger percent of the population.
Edit: I realize my original comment said "people" not "proportion of people", but in my defense interpreting it to be people literally is a bit absurd. Sweden's population is about 30x smaller than the United States, so there's no way the counts are comparable!
Edit 2: Actually no I did say “As a percentage”. Whew.
Next, you can see from this sample of federal prison (table on page 2): though drug offenses were the most serious charge for half of prisoners, only 0.1% was for possession. The rest was for trafficking and sales. https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/dofp12.pdf
This data is from 2010, and the United States has undergone a decriminalization revolution since regarding possession, so new prosecutions are even less likely to be possession claims.
> If any sort of majority of our prison population had committed violent crimes
This is more or less a myth, depending on how you define "violent" and how you define "prison population." No matter how you define those terms, "a significant percentage of the prison population is there for a serious non-drug crime" should be uncontroversial.
Memes about mass incarceration have been almost too successful, so that people now have the wrong idea in the other direction. According to Wikipedia, "15 percent of state prisoners at year-end 2015 had been convicted of a drug offense as their most serious infraction." That is enough of a scandal on its own terms, but people have sort of inflated the claims beyond what's really supported by the evidence. It's 15%, not "most" and not a majority, etc. In fact most prisoners are there for serious non-drug offenses.
If you read the words surrounding the number, you might observe that "drug offenders comprise only 17% of state prison populations ". Thus, observing that 48% of incarcerations at the federal level are due to drugs is, well, a different matter entirely.
Also, an important distinction between incarcerations and prisoners is explained on the fourth page of the article. Tl;dr; consider a 2 man prison, with 1 murderer in jail for 20 years and a rotating cast of heroin users serving 1 year sentences. Drug users represent 95% of incarcerations and 50% of prisoners.
> One third of incarcerated folks in the US are there for possession charges.
This is a wildly inaccurate stat, where on earth did you get it? The number of people sentenced on just a simple possession charge is minuscule. Almost always, it's because the underlying crime was violating their parole/probation from a different charge in the course of the arrest.
Your stats are not why people are in jail nor prison. Your stats represent an extremely narrow selection of prisoners meeting the "federal" criteria. Your information is misleading to make it look like most people in jail are due to drug offenses, which is factually untrue.
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