"When you look at the number of people in our state and federal penitentiaries, who are there for possession of small amounts of cannabis, you begin to really scratch your head. We have literally filled up our jails with people who are nonviolent and frankly do not belong there."
--Former House speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), in an interview with Bloomberg News, April 11, 2018WaPo Fact Checker Glenn Kessler awards the former Speaker the maximum Four Pinocchios for this claim. That's a "whopper," and not a hamburger.
So what do we find? In the state correctional institutions, only 3.4 percent of prisoners were in jail for all types of drug possession as of Dec. 31, 2015, according to the Justice Department. While Boehner claimed that the prisons have been filled with nonviolent prisoners, the data show that 54.5 percent are in prison for violent crimes such as murder, rape and robbery and 18 percent involve property crimes; another 11.6 percent are in prison for public order offenses.
In the federal system, the numbers for marijuana possession are astonishingly low. Only 92 people in 2017 were sentenced for marijuana possession in the federal system out of a total of nearly 20,000 drug convictions, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission. That is one-half of 1 percent. Out of all of the drug possession charges, marijuana possession made up 43 percent of all of the drug possession cases.Honestly, anyone who has done any real checking knows that this "party line" is hogwash. Did Mr. Boehner sign on and start spouting off without doing any checking at all? So it would appear.
If that ratio held true in the state prison population, that would mean about 19,000 prisoners for marijuana possession, out of 1.3 million. That's about 1.5 percent. (Note: this is only intended as a very rough illustration, given the paucity of the data. Indeed, Fordham University Professor John Pfaff, who has closely studied the data, concluded the number in prison for marijuana possession could be as low as 0.1 percent. But he says the data used to generate that number had a lot of limitations.)* * *"He is wrong," [Prof. Jonathan] Caulkins [of Carnegie Mellon U.] said. "He is parroting the pro-legalization party line that has been making such claims for a long time. The standard story that the legalization lobby pushes is very rare for prison, and is not terribly common for jail."
There are arguments pro and con for legalizing possession of marijuana, and I won't get into that debate here. But claiming that we can make major reductions in prison and jail populations just by letting out all the people incarcerated for possessing a few joints is just a shameless lie.
Boehner was a terrible Speaker and this hogwash reminds me of so many Republicans who like to spout some sort of conventional wisdom to curry favor with the chattering class.
Boehner's lie is pernicious--sending people to prison is harsh. So when decent people who have busy lives think that people are being sent off to prison for minor offenses, it undermines the moral courage needed to deal with serious criminals.
I have zero issues with unsparing criticism of the criminal justice system, but only when such criticisms are fact-based. Non-fact based criticisms lead to weakness when it comes to punishing wrongdoers.
Boehner is a useful idiot.