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The problem with the article is that the professor doesn't just argue the points you made, but suggests we shouldn't advocate for ending the drug war or reducing sentencing: But according to John Pfaff, a professor at Fordham Law School, neither of those efforts will make a significant dent in the problem, because they are based on a false understanding of why the prison boom happened in the first place. "The reason it’s important to get it right is that if we’re trying to reduce the prison population, we want to make sure we do it correctly—and if you focus on the wrong thing, you won’t solve the problem. So if you think it’s the war on drugs, you might think, ‘OK, if we just decriminalize drugs, that will solve the problem.’ And, you know, it’s true that if we shift away from punishment to treatment that could be a huge improvement. But just letting people out of prison—decarcerating drug offenders—will not reduce the prison population by as much as people think. If you released every person in prison on a drug charge today, our state prison population would drop from about 1.5 million to 1.2 million. So we’d still be the world’s largest incarcerating country; we’d still have an enormous prison population. And if we focused on cutting back sentence lengths, maybe that would weaken DAs’ bargaining power at plea bargaining, but since people aren’t serving the massively long sentences anyway, it probably won’t have that big an effect on prison population either." This is a weird argument, because reducing the prison population by 17% is a significant dent .. |
I don't understand the logic. It does not follow from "ending the drug war won't solve our prison problem" that "we should maintain the drug war".
There is virtually no vocal user of HN that supports the drug war. In every thread about drugs on HN, you can safely assume the entire community agrees that the "War on Drugs" is toxic.