One of the most misleading narratives of pro-criminal advocacy is that America has gone on a prison spending binge while squeezing education. Consider, we are told, what could happen if we took all that money we spend "putting human beings in cages" and instead sent them to Stanford?
What indeed.
Usually, I just dismiss this as so much apples-and-oranges sloganeering, but today I came across a graph (courtesy of the Cato Institute) that illuminates what would happen if we spent a lot more on schools. The light came on for me when I realized that, as the graph shows, we have already spent a lot more on schools, and done so at roughly the same time we have considerably increased our spending on incarceration.
Behold the results.
Let me sum it up at the outset: While our massive increase in spending for prisons has helped bring about a huge decrease in crime -- and with it a huge decrease in the human suffering and private costs crime causes -- our massive increase in spending for education has brought us exactly zip. This is true whether you start tracking the spending increase from the Seventies, Eighties or Nineties. The improvement in test scores is zero. Indeed, our science scores have fallen very slightly.
So could we hear once again which is the better investment? Real improvement in safety, or fake improvement (or more correctly, none at all) in educational attainment?
I'm sorry but there is an element of absurdity to this story. How many people are in prison for violent crime? I've read that 10% of the prison population is responsible for 90% of the violent crime. In any case as crime decreases we spend more on prisons. What a brilliant idea. Sounds like liberalism 101.
It's also kind of hard to swallow this idea when we are repeating prohibition with the same results and worse. Who profits from the war on drugs and who picks up the tab? Cops, cartels, government agencies and bankers profit. The public picks up the tab. We now have cops loading out with the same gear as soldiers in Iraq. Police agencies keep the proceeds from the sale of assets they seize. Drug laws have created policing for profit and placed drug crimes above most of if not all others. As the cops go after dealers there are thousands of rape kits gathering dust in evidence rooms. We have no privacy and are under constant surveillance. You're trading liberty for security and Ben Franklin warned against that 200 years ago.
Half our prisons are filled with drug offenders. All drug laws have their basis in UN treaty. That right there should be enough to set off warning bells in most folks heads. But the real reason drugs are illegal, countless lives are ruined or ended is of course because it makes the elites money. The boys on Wall Street are making a killing. Money laundering is the second or third largest industry on earth with annual revenue in the trillion dollar range. Yes trillion with a T. When they get caught they kick 10 - 20 billion to the feds, end of story. They never see the inside of a jail cell but the youngster growing up in the crappy neighborhood in New York, L.A. or Chicago is destines to. Good thing we're building more prisons.
FYI I'm not a liberal hipster. I am a Constitutional conservative who believes all of the enumerated liberties in the Bill of Rights must be protected. Not just the ones I care for.
RichardS just completed my quota of conspiracy tales/alternative facts for the week.
"How many people are in prison for violent crime" The DOJ reports that 54% of state prisoners are in for violent crimes, and 30% of federal inmates are violent criminals.
"Half of our prisons are filled with drug offenders." No, DOJ reports that only 16% of state prisoners are drug offenders. State prisons house 87% of the nation's inmates. In federal prisons, which house just 13% of U.S. inmates, 48% are drug offenders, but according to the Urban Institute, 99.5% of drug offenders in federal prisons are DEALERS. The drug dealers prosecuted under federal law are typically those who also had guns. Most unarmed dealers are prosecuted by the states. It also important to note that the vast majority of criminals in any U.S. prison got a plea bargain.
With regard to the war on drugs, a little history lesson: Between 1982 and 1992, with Attorneys General Ed Meese and Bill Barr going after drug dealers and Nancy Reagan rolling out her widely criticized "Just Say No" program, the National Institute for Drug Abuse reported that regular cocaine users dropped from 5.8 million to 1.3 million while marijuana users dropped from roughly 22 million to 8.5 million. In the first three years of the Clinton Administration, anti-drug efforts were scrapped, and hospital admissions for heroin and cocaine overdoses increased by over 44% and drug use among teenagers increased over 50%. I guess Reagan was OK cutting the drug profits for his buddies on Wall Street.
Dealing hard drugs is a violent crime by any reasonable measure. Many people who become addicted to hard drugs die from it, while the lives of most of the rest are damaged or ruined. Over the past couple of years the police in Baltimore and Chicago have been forced to back away from shaking down gang members for drugs and guns. Anybody who thinks that leaving dealers on the streets is good economic and social policy needs to spend a few evening hours in the districts where they do their business. By the way, the black market for marijuana is flourishing in Colorado.
"All drug laws have their basis in UN treaty."
Just curious, Richard, but how do you reconcile that statement with the fact that prohibition of drugs predates the UN treaty by a good many years?
Heroin, for example, was outlawed by Congress in 1924, over two decades before the United Nations.
Kent, Mike and mjs have said much of what needs saying here.
Commenters like RichardS are welcome because they talk about important questions in a businesslike way. The problem, as my colleagues show, is that just about everything Richard says is wrong, and has been known to be wrong for years.
Example:
-- "...as crime decreases we spend more on prisons. What a brilliant idea. Sounds like liberalism 101."
This reminds me of something I read constantly in the NYT, to the effect that "even though crime rates are down, we imprison more and more people."
HELLO!!! WAKE UP!!!
Crime rates are down BECAUSE we imprison more and more people, said people being the ones who commit crime. And as the last two or three years show us (not that we needed showing), when the number of criminals in prison goes down, crime goes back up. With the astronomical recidivism rate we have, it could hardly be otherwise.
Everyone versed in the field knows this.
-- And then there was this: "Who profits from the war on drugs and who picks up the tab? Cops, cartels, government agencies and bankers profit."
I almost expected that to read, "Who profits from the war on drugs and who picks up the tab? Cops, cartels, government agencies, bankers and Jews."
Yikes.
We see here the same conspiratorial, inside-out focus I've seen for years of drug prosecutions. The problem is never the drugs, with the dependence, misery, and physical and cognitive damage they cause -- along with thousands of deaths. No, no, the problem is with TRYING TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS. Druggies are not violence-ready, black-market businessmen, nooooo; they're libertarian theorists struggling to give life to the Founders' vision.
I could go on, but I need to develop some restraint. There is actual work to be done just now in helping a new Administration unwind eight years of damage. I am grateful the blog has Kent, Mike and mjs (among others) to point out how completely RichardS is getting this wrong.