Drug Reform Policy Essays

Prisons where essentially build to accommodate a number of prisoners but over the years it has reach over capacity. Today in the United States there are approximately 193,468 federal inmates that consisting of the Bureau of Prisons Custody, private managed facilities and other facilities. The inmates ages range from 18- 65 with the median age being in their late 30’s. This number is counting both male and female population with male being 93.3% of inmates and females being 6.7%. The number of inmates has steadily increase since 1980 with only having approximately less than 50,000 but today the number has gone more up. Drug offenses are the highest number for inmate’s imprisonment, the next highest offense would be weapons, explosives and arson; immigration and miscellaneous fall next in lines. The number for the other offenses such as robbery, extortion, fraud, bribery, burglary, larceny, property offenses and other offenses are lower. Overcrowding prison has become problematic as the prison population continue to increase leading to proper care and attention for prisoners.

The United States has the world's highest incarceration rate. With five percent of the world's population, our country houses nearly twenty-five percent of the world's reported prisoners. Currently there are approximately two million people in American prisons or jails. Since 1984 the prison population for drug offenders has risen from ten percent to now over thirty percent of the total prison population. Federal prisons were estimated to hold 179,204 sentenced inmates in 2007; 95,446 for drug offenses. State prisons held a total of 1,296,700 inmates in 2005; 253,300 for drug offenses. Sixty percent of the drug offenders in prisons are nonviolent and were purely in prison because of drug offenses (Drug War Facts). The question then arises,

When you look at the racial breakdown of the people incarcerated you will find that the Black population has the highest incarceration with Whites and then Hispanics/Latinos next. In 2009, there were 5,018,855 men and women being supervised on probation or parole (Gabbidon, & Greene, 2013, p. 247-282). African Americans and Hispanics consisted of 58% of all prisoners in 2008. One in six black men had been incarcerated as of 2001.

The United States have imprisoned many people in the country than any other due to drug wars. In the year 2014 more than 1.5 million people were arrested for drugs. Drug offenses by itself caused these

In any given year now, incarceration rates has tripled with approximately 13 million people introduced to American jails in any given year. This increase in the prison population far outpaced the crime rate and the US population growth. Today, America has around 5% of the world’s population but a quarter of the world’s prison population.

The War on Drugs is seen by many as an enormous factor of mass incarceration. There were more than 1.5 million drug arrests in the U.S. in 2014. More than 80% of them were for possession only (Drug Policy Alliance, 2017). 208,000 people are incarcerated for drug offenses in state prisons and 97,000 are incarcerated in federal prisons for the same reason. 1 in 5 incarcerated people are drug offenders (Peter Wagner, Bernadette Rabuy, 2017). According to Politifact, “The state and federal prison population remained fairly stable through the early 1970s, until the war on drugs began. Since then, it has increased sharply every year, particularly when Reagan expanded the policy effort in the 1980s, until about 2010…. In 1980, about 41,000 people were incarcerated for drug crimes, according to the Sentencing Project. In 2014, that number was about 488,400 — a 1,000 percent increase.” Even other factors, like

The War on Drugs is one cause for the mass incarceration that has become apparent within the United States. This refers to a drastic amount of people being imprisoned for mainly non-violent crime (“Mass Incarceration” 2016). In addition to people who are not an immediate threat to society being locked up for a substantial duration of time, the economic consequences are costing states and taxpayers millions of dollars. Specifically, every one in five people incarcerated is in prison due to some

The United States is the world leader in the increasing prison rate, in both as a percentage of population and raw figures. As per a fresh report which employs data of each and every state, a record 2,319,258 citizens were in prison or jail at the beginning of 2008; which means one amongst every 99.1 adults.

That leads us to the next point; how many people are in prison that don’t need to be there? According to a study conducted by the Brennan Center for Justice over the course of three years, 39% of people in prison don’t actually need to be in prison. That’s 578,000 people out of two million. 25% of those people would be better off receiving treatment (mental and/or drug), probation, or community service. The other 14% have been there

There are over 2million people incarcerated today in the United States and Statistics show that the rates every

Prison overcrowding is a major problem in our criminal justice system and it continues to be a hotly debated topic as to how we should address the problem. One of the main reasons our prison systems have a problem with overcrowding is drugs. More specifically, the "war on drugs" started by President Reagan in 1982 brought a dramatic increase to the number of people put behind bars for drug offences. Mandatory minimum sentencing and truth in sentencing are two policies which have sent drug offenders to prison and kept them there for longer periods of time. The continuing crusade against drugs has apprehended hundreds of thousands of suspects who spend millions on drugs but the cost to incarcerate these non-violent offenders exceeds billions of dollars and much of that money is coming from the taxpayers ' pockets. One way to address this problem is to reverse the current trend of putting first time, non-violent drug offenders in prison and instead sentence these offenders to boot camp and counselling combined with family support.

Mandatory minimums for controlled substances were first implemented in the 1980s as a countermeasure for the hysteria that surrounded drugs in the era (“A Brief History,” 2014). It was believed that stiff penalties would discourage people from using drugs and enhance public safety (“A Brief History,” 2014). However, that theory has failed and instead of less illegal drug activity, there are more people incarcerated. Over half of federal prisoners currently incarcerated are there on drug charges, a percentage that has risen 116 percent since 1970 (Miles, 2014). Mass incarceration is an ever growing issue in the United States and is the result of policies that support the large scale use of imprisonment on a sustained basis for social, political or economic purposes that have little to do with law enforcement. Drug policies stemming from the War on Drugs are to blame and more specifically, the mandatory minimum sentencing mandates on petty drug charges which have imprisoned millions of non-violent offenders in the last three decades. Since this declaration

Attention Getter: It is estimated that there are about 2.2 million offenders in U.S. prisons. That is larger than some samllers nation’s whole population.

The War on drugs policy is something that is well known to all conservative congress members that support its creation. It’s a declaration first made in 1971 by President Richard Nixon to buckle down and to be rid of drugs within our streets. This policy has expanded and grown into the present year with minimum sentencing for carrying drugs to reform policies to prevent drug use (A brief History). This was done in order to accomplish one goal, to make the streets of the United States better and to keep its people safe. Every policy and reform that congress has passed was created from the perspective of concerned

The drug war has dramatically affected the number of imprisoned Americans, as well as its prisons. According to DrugSense.Org, 1,576,339 people have been arrested for drug law offenses this year alone. And out of those, 9,261 have been incarcerated. As for marijuana offenses, 747,183 people have been detained. In fact, most of the non-violent offenders sitting in state, local and federal prisons