Some More Evidence Against the War on Drugs Hypothesis

I started my previous post with a graph showing the steep rise in the total prison population. So I want to start this one with a graph showing the steep rise—and then the sudden plateau, and then the decline—in the share of prisoners in prison on drug charges.

Two things jump out on this graph. First, after a rapid rise the percent of drug offenders peaks at 21.8%, in 1990. Second, from 1990 forward the fraction steadily declines, with only a few upticks here and there, to 18.4% in 2008; by 2009, it was down to 17.8%. In other words, in 1990, nearly 80% of all prisoners were non-drug offenders, and by 2009 that percent had risen to more than 84%. And almost all of these other inmates are serving time for violent or property offenses.

 

Adding in the federal system, which is much more drug-focused—about half of all federal prisoners are serving time for drug crimes—does not change numbers or trends much: 24.1% in 1990, 22.1% in 2009. This is unsurprising: despite the extensive (in fact, quite excessive) attention it receives from legal academics, the federal system held only 13.5% of all prisoners in 2011, and until the 2000s it wasn’t even the largest prison system in the country, lagging behind California.

In short, as I’ve noted before, there simply aren’t “enough” drug offenders in prison for the drug-incarcerations-drive-prison-growth story to hold. Yes, in both relative and absolute numbers there are a lot more than there were before the incarceration boom, but not so many that they can be seen as the primary engine of prison growth.

But I can make the case for the relative unimportance of drug incarcerations even more precisely. The table below reports the number of violent, property, drug, and other offenders in 1980 and 2009 in state prisons.

	1980	2009	% Change	% Contribution
Total	294,000	1,362,200	363%	NA
Violent	173,300	724,300	318%	52%
Property	89,300	261,200	192%	16%
Drugs	19,000	242,200	1,175%	21%
Other	12,400	134,500	985%	11%

Between 1980 and 2009, state prisons added 1,120,200 prisoners, and of these 551,000—or 52%—were convicted of violent offenses. Increase drug incarcerations explain only 21% of the growth.

Of course, there are multiple ways to spin this table—counting is hard. One version is that 68% of the growth in prison came from incarcerating people for index offenses. Another version is that 48% of the growth came from locking up non-violent (i.e., property, drug, and other) offenders. Assuming, of course, that none of the property and drug offenders were actually arrested or even charged with violent crimes but struck plea bargains that dropped the violent offense. 

But either way, the table deals a solid blow to the drug-incarcerations-drive-prison-growth thesis.

This is a graphic example of why it is always essential to pay attention to baserates: the percent increase in drug commitments has been huge because the initial level was so low. Thus the overall contribution of increased drug commitments to the increase in total prison population (21%) is not nearly as large as the percent change in drug incarcerations (1,175%) alone might suggest. It seems counterintuitve that drug incarcerations could grow almost four times as fast as violent incarcerations yet be less than half as important, but such is the nature of baserates.

Drug commitments were the fastest growing segment, but not the most important segment. 

We see this elsewhere in the prison debates as well. Consider, for example, female prisoners. We used to hear that women had become the fastest growing population in prison. This is not surprising at all—in fact, the opposite effect would be quite unexpected. In 1990, there were 44,065 women prisoners in a system with 743,382 prisoners; in 2010, there were 105,200 women in a system with 1,544,200 prisoners. Thus the number of women prisoners grew by 139%, compared to 106% for men. Yet of the 800,818 prisoners added between those years, 739,683—92.4%!—were men. Rates of growth can be deceptive if the populations start from different bases.

Again, this is not to say that drug arrests and incarcerations have played no role in prison growth, or that rolling back the War on Drugs will have no effect on incarceration. But it does suggest that whatever effects there are will be indirect and complicated. A simple policy of drug decarceration will not yield the returns that many think.