Thursday, August 24, 2006

America on Drugs Pierre Tristam has an outstanding piece: When Admitting Failure Is Forbidden - America On Drugs. The whole thing is worth reading and quoting. Here's a snippet. The country is addicted to the bureaucracy of the war. It keeps prisons in business. It keeps police departments fattening up their ranks. It lets politicians on the stump freebase on tough-sounding rhetoric, cost-free. It is the law-enforcement establishment's bottomless welfare plan, with more dire results than social welfare ever caused those on the dole. For all its "welfare queen" myths and admitted failures, social welfare programs had their millions of successes, keeping people out of poverty or helping them through bad patches. The drug war is a legacy of victims. Its only true winners are its enablers and dependents -- government and law enforcement -- who, experiencing its futility first-hand, should have been leading the charge for reform decades ago. But they're too addicted to 12-step their way out of it. Rather, the quagmire worsens, implicating America's already tattered foreign policy along the way. 7:22:41 PM |  drug policy | Links | permalink | comment []

The drug war fills up Illinois prisons A new report was issued this week about drug incarceration in Illinois, and I got a chance to glance at the actual report last night. Online versions of the report should be available soon. Some really powerful statistics. The Chicago Tribune reports: After two decades of steadily toughening laws, Illinois now puts more people in prison for drug crimes than any state except California, according to a study released Tuesday by Roosevelt University. The report also found that more people are being incarcerated for possessing narcotics than for selling them and that the state's prisons hold about five black inmates convicted of drug offenses for every white inmate--one of the largest racial disparities in the country. The findings cast doubt on the fairness and effectiveness of Illinois' long campaign against illegal drugs, said Kathleen Kane-Willis, a researcher at Roosevelt's Institute for Metropolitan Affairs. "Just locking folks up is not reducing our drug problems, but it's sure costing us a lot of money," she said. And here's a pretty revealing statistic: Illinois incarceration by drug offense: Sale Possession 1983 264 180 2002 5,761 6,999 Update: Title of post changed to make more sense. 9:27:11 AM |  drug policy | Links | permalink | comment []