The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

Recreational drug use isn’t good, and black leaders, as well as white leaders, should do everything possible to eradicate it from their communities. But the government’s war on drugs has done little, if anything, to curtail drug use among blacks or any other Americans. A reduction in drug use involves the work of counselors, parents, teachers, preachers, doctors and friends. It takes a culture, not armed state agents charged with feeding a growth industry of incarceration.

Joel Dyer, author of “The Perpetual Prisoner Machine; How America Profits from Crime,” told The Gazette that blacks are disproportionately arrested for drugs mostly because of their collective economic plight.

“We still have a higher percentage of blacks than whites living in poverty,” Dyer said. “In policing, communities tend to have more enforcement in minority and low income neighborhoods. That means if you’re using drugs, and you live in one of those neighborhoods, you’re more likely to get caught. You are likely to be defended by a busy public defender’s office, rather than a private lawyer who can spend ample time and money on your case. Once you’re in prison for drugs, you stand a good chance of becoming a violent criminal because it’s tough to survive in prison.”

Dyer, an expert on the public/private prison phenomenon, explains that for nonviolent drug convicts, survival in the joint often involves joining a race-based prison gang that mandates violent behavior.

“Stiff penalties for drug crimes can actually generate violent crime because drug convicts eventually get released, having become violent in prison,” Dyer said.

Research by author and former law professor David Kopel, of the Golden-based Independence Institute, has found that incarceration of drug criminals diverts law enforcement resources from violent crime and results in shorter sentences for violent criminals. That’s partly because imprisonment of common drug offenders has created a cell shortage. Burgeoning inmate populations have left sheriffs and politicians throughout the country clamoring for new and bigger prisons for the past decade. When voters balk at funding them, private corporations build the institutions and charge the state for feeding and housing inmates.

In a system that has turned drug users into a cash commodity, some local sheriffs are soliciting them the way motel chains woo travelers. Last year, the Park County Sheriff’s Office published a flier that said: “Overcrowding a problem? House your prisoners in our ‘park.’ ” Park County transports them, houses them and feeds them in the jail for $45 a day — the cost of a cheap motel room.

Drug sentences conveniently feed an informal and slightly delusional pact of public servants and private profiteers desperate for more prison space needed to grow an industry founded on a fake, government-mandated need.

Any society that views human captivity as economic development isn’t well. Prisoners are not functional, productive members of society. They are dependent liabilities that drain money, time and energy from productive elements of the community. While some who traffic in prisoners earn profits, it’s merely a redistribution of wealth with a negative economic outcome for everyone else.

We need prisons in order that governments — not profiteers — can protect us from violent predators and those who steal wealth and destroy property. Prisons and jails are necessary evils, not societal assets.

Official drug prohibition results in a dangerous and sometimes violent black market, as forbidden trade usually does. In this case, the underground market has spawned a judicial racket that places a price on human heads. Based on our history, it’s not surprising that the humans in our modern inmate trade are disproportionately black.
http://www.gazette.com/opinion/drug_31716___article.html/county_violent.html