Drug Offenders In Federal Prisons

The United States spends nearly $81 billion per year on corrections, but where is this money coming from, where is it going, and is it actually reducing crime rates? Crime rates in the United States have fallen since 1991 and murder rates have also fallen by half in last 25 years, however the prison population has increased by 500% in the last 40 years. Increase in the number of incarcerated citizens also lead to an increase in new prisons around the country and also the crippling of the american justice system. As the author of Wages of Rebellion describes, the prison-industrial-system as the most

President Nixon first declared the “war on drugs” on June of 1971. This came after heavy drug use during the 1960s. New York in particular, had a rise in heroin use. After Nixon’s declaration, states began decriminalizing the possession and distribution of marijuana and other drugs. Many small drug offences led to a mandatory fifteen years to life. This Drug War has led to an increase of incarceration rates since. One of the earliest laws that followed Nixon’s announcement were the Rockefeller Drug Laws that to not only failed to deter crime but also lead to other problems in the criminal justice system. With the Rockefeller Drug Laws came heavy racial disparity of those incarcerated for drug related crimes. Although the Obama Administration has begun reforms, the new President Elect Trump’s views may bring all the efforts back down.

On June 17th 1971, President Richard Nixon stood in front of congress and announced his widely criticized War on Drugs. The President claimed that drugs were the “Public Enemy Number One” among Americans. Fast-forward to 1986, Congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986. This act placed mandatory minimum sentences on minor drug infractions. The war on drugs not only incarcerated a very high number of Blacks, but also tore families apart in an effort to clean up neighborhoods which still affect many African American families almost a half-century later.

While it’s cheap to put someone on probation or parole, it is expensive to incarcerate a person for a year. It costs $45,000 to house and feed an inmate for one year. “There are approximately 1,325 state prisons and 84 federal prisons in operation across the country today”. (Schmalleger pg 390) If you have 2000 inmates in one prison then that will cost roughly $90,000,000 to support those prisoners for just one year and that is only for one prison. From 1991 to 2007, there was a 37% decrease in the national crime rate and a 62% increase in the rate of imprisonment. The Public Safety Performance Project released a report that predicts the nation’s prison population will rise to more than

Starting during the 1980s, when the State and Federal government were struggling to combat an extreme rise in drug use throughout the country, the “war on drugs” was declared by President Richard Nixon. “Zero tolerance” policies, “broken window” policing, and other unreasonably severe punishments were placed in society in order to barricade the dramatic influx of illegal drug use. According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), these “‘one-strike’ policies and drug arrests now account for over a quarter of the 2.3 million people locked up in America.” These nonviolent drug offenders face sentences for

From the article titled “The Punishment Imperative : The Rise and Failure of Mass Incarceration in America” by Todd Clear, and Natasha Frost, it goes into full detail on why the incarceration rate is failing. America incarcerates way more people that far exceeds the rate of our top allies. “With just under ten million people incarcerated in prisons and jails worldwide, America incarcerated more than one-fifth of the world’s total prison population.” (The Punishment Imperative: The Rise and Failure of Mass Incarceration in America, Page 17) The United States now is in the lead in the world of incarceration, that beats countries like Russia, Rwanda, St. Kitts & Nevis, and Cuba, and the country has four times the rate of European nations. Maintaining the prisons came with a staggering price. In 2006, jurisdictions would spend around $68 billion on correctional supervision. They went from spending from $9 billion in 1982 to an 660 percent increase of $68 billion in 2006. Around the same time period, direct judicial expenditures has increased by 503 percent and the policing expenditures increased by 420 percent. The huge majority of the correctional dollars, with was around 90 percent, went to stabilize mass incarceration. “With a national average annual price tag of almost $29,000 per person per year of incarceration, it cost taxpayers at least ten times more to incarcerate a person than it would have cost to maintain him or her under supervision in the community.” (The Punishment Imperative: The Rise and Failure of Mass Incarceration in America, Page 21) In general, this is an issue because the taxpayers are forced to pay a lot of money to maintain a person in prison. Locking up a serious violent offender is justified, however, for thousands of lower-level inmates, it costs taxpayers more than preventing

As agreed by Prisons: Problems and Prospects Prisons and the War on Drugs, “incarceration rates for murderers, robbers, and burglars have remained steady over the years, but the number of drug offenders who have been imprisoned has steadily escalated”. The “war on drugs” has, for the most part, added to prison overcrowding. However, it has particularly extended the degree of minorities who are sent to prison. Further readings by Nathan James (2016), “mandatory minimum penalties have contributed to the growing federal prison population”. In addition, this report also added some alternative to this development problem, “Even if Congress chooses not to repeal any mandatory minimum sentences, policymakers could review current mandatory minimum penalties to ensure that they are (1) not excessively severe, (2) narrowly tailored to apply only to those offenders who warrant such punishment, and (3) applied consistently” (James, 2016). “(1) Today narcotics offenders occupy 61% of the beds in federal prisons. (2) Meanwhile, 1 in 7 state facilities continues to operate beyond capacity. (3) Ohio leads the pack with a stunning 182% of capacity” (Smolowe, 1994).

Mandatory minimums have been wreaking havoc on the prison systems for years by giving first offense, non-violent, drug offenders outrageous sentences. This has been clogging up the system with low-level drug offenders. According to the US Department of Justice, the federal prisons were filled with 50% of non-violent drug offenders, while 7% of that same total are violent offenders (1,17). Having such a high amount of low level prisoners incarcerated is wasting taxpayer’s money, the Federal Register explains “The fee to cover the average cost of incarceration for Federal inmates in Fiscal Year 2014 was $30,619.85” (Samuels). That’s only one person, now multiply that number by the

We must enact policies that downscale the prison population. The best approach is to shift resources away from the incarceration and punishment of certain inmate categories, such as nonviolent drug offenders, investing instead in their rehabilitation. Though correction systems have historically favored punishment over ‘softer’ rehabilitation, most nonviolent, drug-related offenders would benefit more from rehabilitation than incarceration. Today, in great part as a consequence of the War on Drugs, our prisons house over half a million drug offenders, representing over one-half of the federal inmate population in the United States, an increase of 790 percent since 1980. It is time for new leadership on the War on Drugs which has cost billions of dollars and has caused the endangerment of inmates’ and correctional officers’ lives due to mass incarceration. Do we wish to continue being the most punitive developed country in the world? Instead of implementing mandatory

Prisons are expensive facilities to operate. Each year, California prisons house more than 100,000 inmates (Graves, “Fewer State Prisoners, Higher Cost Per Inmate”). While the number of inmates has been steadily decreasing, spending per inmate has skyrocketed to about $60,000 from $33,000 in 1995 (Dean, “CA Spending Per Inmate Rising Faster Than Spending Per Child”). That is about six billion dollars spent on prisoners alone. The government is wasting more and more taxpayer money on keeping inmates inside the prisons. With about 58% of ex-convicts returning to prison within

Another major subset in the overall prison population in the U.S. is the growing rise in incarceration rates of drug offenders. Professor Blumstein notes that when considering the growth of incarceration rates by specific type of crime, such as murder, robbery, assault, burglary, drugs, and sex offenses during the two decades from 1980 to 2001, the single most important result was that the prison rate for drug offenders increased by a factor of 10; moreover, these drug offenders currently account for the largest percentage of both state and federal prison populations (Blumstein, 2011).

We jail a grand amount of the population most times, who don’t necessarily produce any harm or those who have not committed violent crimes. Most arrest, convictions, and sentencing are a product of drug related issues. “Sentencing policies of the War on Drugs era resulted in dramatic growth in incarceration for drug offenses” (The Sentencing Project, 2016, p.3).

A paramount issue regarding prison populations in America, are the finances associated with running institutions of such magnitude. The cost of operations for any kind of incarceration facility is beyond exorbitant. The public overlooks the expenses of training employees, providing programs for inmates (vocational training, education, etc.), legal and medical assistance for inmates, maintenance and facility upgrades and etc. The funding for all this comes from tax payers at the local, state, and federal levels with assistance from federal programs and Congress. A better explanation is that local and state facilities are paid for by local and state taxes along with federal aid whenever it is attainable. Federal institutions are paid for through

Drug related offenses need guidelines of whom or what constitutes being sent to prison. Drug offenses should be separated into categories because of the magnitude in which they occur. The war on drugs has elevated incarceration rates dramatically. The government does not aim to create a system that will send individuals to prison in forms that will rehabilitate or punish the individual in an effective manner. These offenses can be divided into carrying a certain amount, caught under the influence, and distribution of drugs. It is my belief that if an individual abuses drugs then he/she deserves treatment rather than being sent to prison. This would be a more effective method because once they enter prison there are methods in which they

You are correct to say that the prisons are full of people who committed non-violent crimes with most being drug related. The problem is that the African Americans are mostly the reason for this increase. African Americans are also the race that received the longer and stiffer penalties. The text states, “Human service professionals should be concerned about the governmental policy that either directly or indirectly targets a certain segment of the population (Martin, 2014, p. 355). Even though many activists are concern with the drug problems in the U.S. and know that something has to be done, however, are questioning the policy regarding “War on Drugs”.