JURIST - Hotline: Overcrowded California prisons and the incarceration of drug offenders

Nicolas Eyle [Executive Director, RECONSIDER]: "Nearly three decades after California cracked down on rising crime rates with tougher sentencing laws, Californians are beginning to realize the downside of what many experts say has been one of the most poorly planned prison expansions in the country. A recent Justice Policy Institute study states that California leads the nation in drug offender imprisonment with a rate of 115 per 100,000 (the national average is 44 per 100,000).

The basic problem is a familiar one – lawmakers and prosecutors sent far more criminals to prison than Californians, ultimately, were willing to pay for. People love the idea that people whose lifestyles they disapprove of can be sent to prison. The second part of the equation, that there is a significant cost to this form of social engineering, has been conveniently ignored. The result has been such acute overcrowding that critical prison programs and services are breaking down and require enormously expensive fixes.

This is a problem by no means peculiar to California. By the year 2000, there were 458,131 drug offenders incarcerated in America's prisons and jails – approximately the size of the entire US prison and jail population of 1980. This means that nearly one in four (23.7%) prisoners in America is incarcerated for a non-violent drug offense. Contrary to the public perception that the incarceration of violent offenders has driven America's prison growth the major group responsible for the overcrowding of California's prisons is non-violent drug offenders.

It is also important to understand that there is no connection between increases in incarceration and decreased crime rates. States with far smaller increases in prison sentencing rates than California have experienced even greater decreases in crime rates.

As long as drug prohibition remains the law of the land and Americans refuse to adopt serious alternatives such as legalization and regulation there are only two choices for our country's prison dilemma; If our prisons are currently filled to double their capacity we must either significantly increase taxes to build new facilities equivalent in capacity to those currently existing, or warehouse inmates in overcrowded hellholes comparable to those in the poorest of third world nations. Neither of these is cost-effective nor realistic in the long run."