Drug Use And Its Effect On Crime

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,

In July, 2001 Portugal 's Law 30/20001 decriminalized all drugs. Under the new law, possession of small amounts of drugs (~10 days or less worth of personal use), while still legally prohibited, were no longer grounds for criminal offense. This approach was taken from a public health perspective and was accompanied by a concurrent increase in treatment and harm-reduction options.2 The combination of decriminalization, taking drug-users out of the criminal justice system, and investment in harm-reduction, providing users with effective treatment options, led to material gains in public health, including significant reductions of drug overdose death and HIV infection.3

The impact of cocaine addiction or dependence on increased crime rates and criminal activity is attributed to the link between the drug and a significant number of illegal activities. Apart from being associated with increased violent activities, cocaine dependence has also resulted in increased homicide and suicide. A study in New York City demonstrated that homicide deaths were strongly linked to cocaine or its metabolite (Morton, 1999, p.111). In the survey, most of the victims and perpetrators of homicide tested positive for cocaine use. Cocaine dependence or addiction may contribute to suicide because of the probability of the user to suffer from depression, which tends to occur frequently among cocaine users.

Criminology has always debated the central tension between individual autonomy and public welfare. This conceptual point of comparison is especially pertinent in regards to victimless crimes: acts or omissions that are punishable by law, but do not result in any direct, non-consensual harm to individuals, property, or public welfare (Bending, 2016; Herzog and Einat, 2016: 470; Weatherburn, 2011:1) This essay will assess the statement ‘There is no such thing as a victimless crime’. It will firstly support the assertion, arguing that recreational methamphetamine use is not a victimless drug crime since it directly exposes users’ dependents to grave physical and psychological dangers, is strongly associated with violent crime, and causes acute

The main problem is that there are too many people incarcerated for crimes that range from non violent drug offenders to harmful federal crimes. “Extreme sentencing laws have pushed the number of people in American jails and prisons to over 2.3 million (). These unnecessarily long sentences have led to bloated, overcrowded prisons and wasted billions of taxpayer dollars that could be better invested in our communities” (). There are approximately 318.9 million people in the United States so that means 2.3 million people incarcerated is around 7.2% of American citizens are in some form of correctional control. That’s around the amount of people that live in Houston, Texas which is the fourth largest city in the United

There has been speculation that the decriminalization of all drugs in Portugal has caused a rapid increase in the number of crimes and homicides in Portugal. Between 2001- 2006, the number of homicides increased by 40% from 105 to 148 per year (Murkin, 1). This may be attributed to the fact that now that drugs are legal, drug availability is more prevalent making it much harder for dealers to compete for customers and eventually resulting in turf battles ending in homicides. This could also be a product of directly drug related murders since getting high, causing the person be have less judgment over his or her self, may lead to reckless actions. However, there has been no concrete evidence supporting that the decriminalization of drugs or drug use itself has had any impact on this rise in homicide rate. This is merely a coincidence statistically but may have deeper prevalence if examined much closer. Crime in general since 2001 in Portugal has increased as well, however, these are mostly associated with petty thefts and robberies (Murkin, 1). This, as well, seems associated with the decriminalization of drugs, but researchers have deduced that this increase in document crimes is due to the fact that police officers can now focus their efforts on dealing with these criminals and other offenders of the law rather then having to deal with drug related crimes everyday. This enables more dangerous criminals to be focused on and decreases the number of drug related offenders in

As a result, there´s a lack of a consistent criminal policy on the long term, currently legislation it’s characterized for being reactive, without empirical evidence, incoherent and without a human rights perspective. good Moreover, the country has developed a punitive populism (Criminal Policy Comission, 2012), this means disproportionate legislation, which has led to a more severe punishment for “drug trafficking’ than ‘torture’ or ‘rape’ (DeJusticia, 2013). This throw that the numbers of prisons and correctional institutes at December 31, 2013 were 25.258 offenders detained for Trafficking manufacture or possession of drugs, 14,26% of the total prison

The goal of this paper is to provide information on both the current U.S. “War on Drugs” and Portugal’s use of decriminalization and rehabilitation to treat drug users. Though both policies are on different ends of the spectrum, I believe that they both share the common goal of ending drug abuse in their countries. Whether or not both polices actually do solve the issue of drug abuse is up to time and my intention is to inform you of the history leading to both policies as well as statistics that show both countries attempt to regulate and end drug abuse.

The three types of drug-related crimes explain the relationship between drugs and crime and it helps understand why so many individuals end up in jail for drug related charges.

In addressing the problem proposed, “Does drug use encourage criminal behavior?” The observation date used to collect data to address this question is a questionnaire and self-report measure. However, for these measures to be scientifically valid they should process both reliability and validity. The reliability of the question presented, “is does it measure what it supposed to measure.” Reliability is the extents to which when measuring these procedures will they yield the same result on a repeated trial. For example, the question asked, “Have you used drugs, and the answer is “yes” then each time the question is asked your answer should be “yes.” If it were unreliable, the answer to the question

“Drugs and Alcohol abuse”, are phrases we hear commonly on the radio, television or in discussions of social problems. People believe it is the user’s personal choice however; it is not only a personal problem that dramatically affects individuals’ life but is a major social problem that affects society as whole. It has become one of the biggest problems in United States today. Alcohol or Drug abuse nearly automatically is linked with criminal acts. The statistical association between alcohol or drug abuse with crime seems to be convincing when examined at the first glance; however, it is not possible to make a conclusion concerning a distinct cause and effect association between the two aspects. Accordingly, this paper will examine

Cocaine can cause dramatic change in moral code and can lead to bad decision making. But, it can also cause diseases to occur. Some of them are listed below.

The article written by Dabney and Hollinger speaks on pharmaceutical abuses and therapeutic self-medicators. These offenses can be broken down into 4 subgroups that give the framework to a specific crime; behavioral, cognitive, the criminal sub-culture, and societies reaction to the crime.

I think the first thing to address is like drug offenders are to make a separate court system for the mentally ill personally to handle the underline issue, fixing the root problem. The state is paying to constantly arrest, medicate and house for mentally ill so why not turn around and use the same type of resources to have a safe place community. Make housing communities specifically for the mentally ill. Letting the specialized people handle the same people so they could keep track a lot easier. They would have consent aid around them. Consisted monitoring of medication is taken and sees if there is any new issue arriving. Finally folks would notice some type of normality.

Drug abuse and predatory criminality go hand in hand in a few, select social groups, while in others, drug abuse most often occurs without criminal behavior (other than the fact they’re doing drugs.) Despite what most might think, drug abuse typically follows predatory criminality. As drug abusers keep trying harder drugs due to necessity, the intensity of their criminal behavior escalates dramatically. When using more than one type of drug at one time, studies show that the frequency of criminal activity increases. But, when these drug offenders decrease the amount of drugs they put in their system, their rate of criminal activity also decreases, which shows that drugs can cause a person to commit crime. This shows that drug usage can cause crime and stopping drug usage can slow or even halt criminal activity.