Drug conviction effects on United States prison populations

¶ … United States represents the best society that the world has ever seen. It is a land of opportunity that offers its citizens levels of freedom unknown to prior generations and material comforts that the rest of the world envies. These freedoms and comforts, however, come at a steep price and one of these prices is that the United States is characterized as having one of the world's largest prison populations. A prison population that is dominated by inmates who have been either convicted of drug related offenses or are suffering from some form of substance abuse.

The enforcement of criminal laws and incarcerating those who pose a danger to public safety is essential for a society based on the rule of law but the fact that so many prisoners are jailed as a result of drug involvement begs the question as to whether or not incarcerating such individuals is a justifiable social solution or whether another course of action might be more appropriate. Since the early 1980s, the United States has been engaged in an aggressive war on drugs and the result of this war has been a dramatic increase in the enforcement of drug offenses and stricter sentencing in regard to such offenses. Since 1980, the number of arrests attributed to drug offenses has nearly tripled from just under 600,000 to almost 1.6 million in 1998 (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2000). A significant number of those arrested have been sentenced to prison and local jails.

These increases have placed a heavy burden on the American prison system. Statistically, a large percentage of those sentenced under the nation's drug laws are not the kingpins of the drug trade, but rather, are low-level offenders who are actual users of drugs and not actively involved in the promotion of the drug trade. Such individuals are in need of treatment and not incarceration and, presently, American prisons are not set up to provide treatment. Instead, these drug dependent individuals are being warehoused and the underlying difficulties that drew these individuals initially to the drug trade are not being addressed. Complicating matters even further is the fact, as substantiated by statistical analysis, that a large percentage of these drug offenders have no history of either violence or high level drug activity (U.S. Department of Justice, 1999). Instead, most of these individuals are being incarcerated because they have a drug problem and not because they are dangerous life-time criminals. What is occurring is that America's prisons are being filled to capacity with individuals needing treatment and who do not present any significant risk to society. Unfortunately, those being incarcerated are also those on the lower end of the economic scale. Upper and middle class individuals in need of treatment for substance abuse have access to such advantages while those from the lower classes do not. The result is that members of the lower class in America find that their substance abuse goes untreated and exposure to the various criminal activities surrounding the drug trade continues. For society at large, this translates into additional costs for arresting, prosecuting and incarcerating substance abusers.