Reformers' myth: Prisons are packed with non-violent drug offenders

Prison reform has emerged in recent years as a trendy issue based on the idea that our corrections facilities are filled with non-violent drug offenders who could become productive members of society if they were released.
Revamping the nation’s approach toward incarceration is the issue that brought together liberal Eric Holder and libertarian Rand Paul. Those who seek to reverse the United States’ highest-in-the-world incarceration rates have recently seen Hillary Clinton jump on the bandwagon.

But David Frum, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush and a moderate Republican, tries to put the brakes on this trend in his new piece for The Atlantic, “Can America Have Fewer Prisons Without More Crime?”

Frum describes the ups and downs of America’s crime rate over the past 50 years and he notes that none of the experts have devised a definitive explanation why criminal behavior dropped dramatically from 1991-2015.
Without a full understand of the dynamics, he argues, policymakers should move cautiously in seeking criminal justice reforms. They should also fully comprehend the realities of our state/federal prison system.

Here’s Frum’s warning:

“Imprisonment rates are already declining, down from a peak in 2007. The majority of people in state prison, more than 53 percent, have been convicted of a violent crime: murder, rape, or robbery. Only about 3.7 percent of the state prison population has been sent there for drug possession alone. (In the much smaller federal system, drug offenses loom larger—but federal drug prisoners are overwhelmingly professional drug dealers, not casual possessors.)

“Putting such people in prison and keeping them there is a harsh, crude, and expensive way to protect society from them. But the suggestion that less prison would leave society no less safe is dangerously glib. The last time the political pendulum swung away from incarceration—in the liberal decade from 1960 to 1970, the total number of prisoners dropped outright, and much more in relation to population—the country got in return the most serious crime wave since Prohibition.”