[tptacek]

A better source, with a previous HN discussion, that says much the same thing, is far better sourced, and makes a lot of other important points:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10091586

HN readers will be unhappy to read that the war on drugs is not principally, directly responsible for US incarceration rates.

HN readers will probably thrilled to read that responsibility for over-incarceration is placed squarely on overzealous prosecutors; the rate at which arrestees are charged with felonies has climbed sharply, despite an overall drop in crime.

[ncallaway]

While it may not be the principal account for incarceration rates, the paper does note that 17% of the current prison population is in prison on drug-related charges. Additionally, it notes that 20% of the growth in prison populations can be attributed to drug-related charges, and that about 20% of the flow of prisoners can be attributed to drug-related charges.

That 20% number is still a massive number of people incarcerated on drug-related charges. It's still a massive problem and solving it will put a huge dent in the insane incarceration rate that we see.

Of course a problem as large as the over-incarceration of the US population is going to be complicated and is going to require many solutions rather than a single silver bullet. I'm all for prosecutorial reform as well as drug reform; I'm willing to bet I'll need to discover several other things that we need to reform in order to bring our incarceration rates down.

Put another way, if I'm optimizing some code and I see 20% of CPU-time is being spent on a trivial operation that is definitely a section of the code that I'm going to evaluate and attempt to readdress even if it doesn't fully resolve the performance issues.

[gsibble]

If the CPU usage of my code jumped by a massive percentage, and only 20% of it can be attributed to one problem, I'm certainly going to pay attention to it. But I'm going to pay a lot more attention to the problems causing the other 80%.

[scottshepard]

Not if the 20% was the single largest individual process sucking up power.

[jccc]

And whose solution was simple (even if not immediately easy to achieve).

[Edit for focus: And whose solution was obvious.]

[mod]

> the rate at which arrestees are charged with felonies has climbed sharply, despite an overall drop in crime.

My gut reaction is that it's probably because of an overall drop in crime. Gotta keep putting up good numbers!

[zeveb]

> HN readers will probably thrilled to read that responsibility for over-incarceration is placed squarely on overzealous prosecutors; the rate at which arrestees are charged with felonies has climbed sharply, despite an overall drop in crime.

Might it not be a cause of the overall drop in crime? If more criminals are being held in prison for longer periods, they have less opportunity to commit new crimes, no?

[tptacek]

Read the paper. It's pretty great, and very detailed.

[hackuser]

> HN readers will be unhappy to read ...

> HN readers will probably thrilled to read ...

I'm unhappy to read this, which does not help the tone of the conversation, and is a counter-productive rhetorical maneuver. It attempts to pre-emptively pidgeonhole people who disagree rather than to learn about what they really think and, gosh forbid, value their opinions and learn from them.