Drug Use And Crime

The number of people incarcerated in America has steeply risen since the beginning of the War on Drugs. In 1980, about 300,000 individuals were in jail. (Alexander, 2010) In 2000, the number rose to over one million, and at the start of 2008, there were 2.3 million adults in prison in America (Pew Center on the States, 2008). These increases in the rate of incarceration are traceable to the War on Drugs (Nunn, 2001). “Convictions for drug offenses are the single most important cause of the explosion in incarceration in the United States (Alexander, 2010).” Drug offenses account for two thirds of the rise in the federal prison population between 1985 and 2000 (Nunn, 2001).

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).

According to Murray (2013), In 2011 the Bureau of Prison’s reported drug offenders constitute for 46.4 percent of the state prison population and 60 percent of the federal population. Many persons arrested were actively engaged in drug use around the time of their arrest. Current urinalysis surveys of persons arrested in twenty-two major cities in the U.S indicted that roughly over half of arrestees tested positive for at least one illicit drug. While 45 percent of state prisoners and 41 percent of federal prisoners say, they were under the influence of drugs when they committed their offence. Therefore, It is clear that drug related behavior takes up a significant part of the prison population.

Available research in the Critical criminal justice issues: Task force reports, shows that the crime associated with drugs has not diminished despite increasingly punitive local, State, and Federal Government interventions and social control (1996). On the contrary, these social issues have shown an increase in the midst of an increasing and costly “war on drugs”. It is obvious that the current correctional system is not correcting anything. The rising number of incarcerated and recidivism does not show that incarceration alone lowers the crime rate. Many of those in jail doing terms could have been handled in other methods over incarceration. A large portion of the population imprisoned is there because they had committed a low-level crime. How can the seriousness of drug abuse warrant a reliance on incarceration as a solution knowing the social significance of incarceration? This paper will address offenders who are convicted of low-level crimes connected to drug abuse, the social implications of the social problem, research data showing the individual and social implications, how society has responded; and the outcome from those responses, a discussion of alternative responses to the problem, and the effectiveness of those alternatives.

Ever since the 1970’s the “War on Drugs” has been an uphill battle. Even back then President Nixon knew that harmful effects some specific drugs can have on not only individuals but the society as a whole. In 1971, President publicly announced that drug-related crimes and drug abuse were “public enemy number one.” Though one could argue that the claims of President Nixon are both outdated and potentially overgeneralized, studies throughout the next forty years have only strength Nixon’s worries. Research has proven that “the vast majority of offenders in the criminal justice system are drug users. In the drug use forecasting (DUF) studies conducted in 20 major cities in 1988, the percentage of male arrestees testing positive for any drug ranged

CRIMINOLOGYDoes drug use cause crime, does crime cause drug use or is the relationship entirely co-incidental?INTRODUCTIONIn this paper I will look at the amount and type of crime caused by drugs, the relationship between drugs and crime and the relationship between alcohol and crime.

Crime occurs when someone the formal written law by an overt act, omission or neglect that can result in punishment (Macionis, et, al., 2013, p.161). The impact of deviance can last for a long time on an individual, and the coping up ways of each individual that has been affected by crime differs from one another. Macionis, et, al., (2013) states that, “the problem of illegal drugs in countries such as Canada is a demand issue. The demand for cocaine and other drugs is increasing in alarming rate; as a result people look for illegal ways to get drugs. Which increase in crime rate on how people smuggle these drug to where it’s illegal, and high rates of addiction in many young people who are willing to risk arrest or even death for a chance

They are easier to incarcerate because they are not financially equipped to battle charges. Meanwhile, all these steps have been taken by the government, but the country has not seen improvement in drug crime or drug addiction.

The number of individuals incarcerated in U.S. prisons has amplified, and a decent amount of inmates are substance abusers (“Alcohol, drugs, and crime,” 2015). It has been found that “80% of offenders abuse drugs or alcohol” and “Approximately 60% of individuals arrested for most types of crimes test positive for illegal drugs at arrest” (“Alcohol, drugs, and crime,” 2015). Those who use drugs are going to commit crime to feed their habit, which usually means committing crime, such as robbery or shoplifting for items to sell for drug money or stealing money itself (“Alcohol, drugs, and crime,” 2015). In 2004, inmates confessed that he or she broke the law to acquire money to buy illegal drugs (“Alcohol, drugs, and crime,” 2015). The illegal drug

When it comes to looking at the link between drug use and crime, I think statistically they are inter-related. However, I think this only applies when someone is using drugs improperly. An example being if someone over doses on a haulucengicenic and then results in thinking they can rob a bank.

One of the most common beliefs today is that the drug-crime link is viewed as causal. More notably, it is presumed that drug use is one of the key motives of crime. However, criminological proof to support this belief is not as resilient as many have might imagined. Rather, the best obtainable investigation has commonly decided that the relationship is exceedingly complex and challenges attempts to sort out directionality.

It has been over forty years since Richard Nixon declared a “war on drugs” and implemented more policies to reduce America’s drug problem. After Nixon decided to tackle on this drug problem, there was a huge increase in arrests throughout the 1980s. In the mid-1990s, there was a decline in violent crime arrests but a steady increase in the drug arrests (LaFree,1999). This decline in violent crime rates have suggested that there might be something more at large that can explain why violent crimes have decreased while other crimes have increased.

A lot of people link drug abuse with crime, at times even with violent crime. This association comes from psychopharmacological association that imply that people may engage in criminal acts after taking some kind of substance known to undermine their judgment as well as self-control result in paranoid thoughts and distortion of inhibitions (Sewell, Poling and Sofuoglu, 189). Though all substances that affect the central nervous system might result in this kind of relationships, scientific information indicates that some type of drugs have a more strong effect than others. Such drugs are alcohol, cocaine, phencyclidine and amphetamines (McCauley, Ruggiero, Resnick and Kilpatrick, 136). Inversely, cannabis and heroin are less associated with desire to commit

In a study that was done back in 1970 by Sutherland and Cressey, they pointed out that in the U.S. alone, “felons are overrepresented in the addict population, [and] crime rates are increased considerably by drug addiction” (1970, p. 164). Despite having proposed several hypotheses attempting to explain the correlation between drug abuse and crime, they could not reach a conclusion. A decade later, the knowledge about the drug/crime relationship had steadily increased due to numerous studies of the incarcerated or addicted population. However, the information didn’t reveal any viewpoints that made sense aside from heroin. This view was

Drug abuse and crime is not a new concept and the statistics around the problem have continued to rise. According to (Office of Justice Programs, 2011), there were an estimated 1,846,400 state and local arrests for drug abuse in the United States. Additionally, 17 percent of state prisoners and 18 percent of federal inmates said they committed their current offense to obtain money for drugs (Office of Justice Programs, 2011). Based on this information, we can conclude that our criminal justice systems are saturated with drug abusers. The United States has the highest imprisonment rate and about 83 percent of arrests are for possession of illegal drugs (Prisons & Drug Offenders, 2011). Based on these figures, I can conclude that we should be more concerned about solving the drug abusers problems and showing them an alternative lifestyle rather than strict penalty of long term incarceration which will inevitably challenge their ability to be fully functioning citizens after release.