Setting the Stage: The Explosion in Prison Populations

The graph below never ceases to amaze, no matter how many times I look at it. 

The explosion starting in the mid-1970s was unprecedented in American history or world experience. And it came out of the blue. In one of the worst-timed articles in criminology, Alfred Blumstein, one of the nation’s most prominent criminologists, wrote in 1979 that:

The existence of such a stable imprisonment rate suggests that, as a nation’s prison population begins to fluctuate,  pressure is generated to restore the prison population to that stable rate.

Not exactly. Today, the US is home to about 5% of the world’s prisoners population, but nearly 25% of its prisoners. Our prison-and-jail incarceration rate* of 756 (in 2011) is the highest in the world. The countries filling out the top ten (in descending order) are Russia, Cuba, Belarus, Belize, Georgia (the country—the state has a higher rate), Kazakhstan, Suriname, South Africa, Botswana, Israel, Ukraine, and Chile; Russia’s rate of 629** putting it in the number 2 slot. If we are known by the company we keep, we should be worried. European countries outside of the former Warsaw Bloc states all have incarceration rates in the 100s, as does China (and Saudi Arabia).

Like all zombie ideas, the claim linking the War on Drugs to this explosion has some facial plausibility. The surge in incarceration and the War on Drugs started around the same time (if you use the Reagan Administration, not the Nixon one, as the starting point for the War on Drugs). And between 1980 and 2009, the number of prisoners incarcerated on drug offenses rose by approximately 1,175%! 

But like with all zombies, cracks in the argument become quickly apparent. Take the 1,175% number. In 1980, there were 19,000 drug inmates in state prison, a number which soared to 242,200 in 2009. And yes, that means there are more people in prison today for drug crimes than were in prison in 1972 for all crimes (around 200,000).

But in 2009, there were over 1.36 million people in state prison. And 242,200 is only 17.7% of 1.36M. So a lot of non-drug offenders were added to prison during those years, too—a lot more, in fact, than drug offenders.

Adding in the federal system—which is much more heavily focused on drug offenders, who comprise nearly 50% of its inmates—does not change the analysis much. Including the federal numbers, 337,405 prisoners out of 1.52 million, or 22.2% of all prisoners, were serving time for drug offenses.

Consider the following thought experiment. What would US prison populations in 2009 look like if in 1980 we released all 23,900 prisoners serving time for drug offenses (the 19,000 state prisoners plus 4,900 federal drug inmates) and proceeded to admit no prisoners for drug crimes in the subsequent years? Instead of rising 3.8-fold, it would have risen 3-fold. A difference, but not an enormous one. (I’ll show my work for these numbers shortly in a future post.)

In other words, we would have had our unprecedentedly vertiginous prison population even without the increase in drug incarcerations. Liberate all drug offenders from our prisons and jails, and our global rank would, at best, drop all the way to... number 2. Maybe number 3. Slightly less punitive than Russia, maybe Cuba.

So a simple look at just a handful of easy-to-find numbers—the total number of prisoners, the total number of drug offenders—and the blame-the-war-on-drugs claim already starts to fall apart. There simply are not enough drug offenders in prison for them to be doing much heavy lifting.

 

* My focus here is on prisons alone, since jail populations are less well measured and are more substantively heterogeneous: prisons are for convicted felons sentenced to at least a year or more of incarceration, while jails hold offenders (generally misdemeanants) serving sentences of less than a year and those being held awaiting trial. Jails also have much higher turnover rates (such as people spending a few days before making bail), making it hard to understand what exactly a one-time population count actually tells us. The international statistics, however, only report the aggregate prison-and-jail rates, likely because not every country divides its system the way the US does.

** Thus the difference between our incarceration rate and Russia's is equal to or greater than the total incarceration rate of most Western European countries (~ 100 per 100,000).