"Millions of Americans have gone missing from the workforce. Every month that those would be worker are gone raises the odds that they might never come back, dimming the prospects for future economic growth."Black males are consistently arrested, punished and imprisoned for drug offenses at rates that range from three times to eleven times the white rates.
"...some aspects of the vanishing trend remain a mystery. Economists are struggling to explain why a large number of prime-aged African American men aren't working...declining participation to be 'disproportionately concentrated among the less educated and younger groups within the male and female populations..."
There are more than 1.5 million drug arrests each year.
Good point Mr. Sterling. I just came back from Riker's Island correctional facility to visit an inmate. I can definitely understand the economic lures of selling drugs rather than working, even if it is illegal and dangerous. Now that we can see the other side of the economic argument, what do you recommend that benefits convicts (who would otherwise resort to drug dealing) and our country in the long term? Ending the War on Drugs? Decriminalization? Legalization? What do you see as the solution?
ReplyDeleteWe often hear about ex-offenders re-entering society or the community. Fundamental to that is their re-entry into the economy. They need jobs. We need to minimize conditions that limit their entry into the workforce after they have completed their sentence and demonstrated that they have gone "straight." After some number of years of clean and non-offending behavior, perhaps 5 years for most drug and other offenses, the former offender's convictions should be treated as sealed and inoperative as a limitation upon full citizenship. This is essentially putting a period at the end of a sentence -- a basic feature of our grammar but no longer a feature of our justice system. Records of convictions for most offenses need to be sealed after periods appropriate to the offense in order to increase the full re-integration of ex-offenders into the economy and the society.
ReplyDeleteRegarding the bigger question of "drug policy" that you ask about, along a long spectrum of issues, I think that "legalization" of drugs -- meaning regulation, licensing, taxation with all the complexity and options those terms imply -- is the best bet for society. We must be aware that it will result in eliminating a great deal of income earned from drug dealing that supports families, pays rent, and flows into various communities, with very significant economic consequences. A benefit of legalization for those communities, however, it that they will no longer have to suffer large numbers of men going to prison, the disorder of open air drug markets, the violence of the drug trade, the perverse role modeling, and the exclusion from the workforce.
The nature of other crime problems may depend upon how legal drugs are distributed, and how addiction problems are managed.
"Decriminalization" has several meanings. The older meaning, from the 1972 report of the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse, is that marijuana possession would be a minor civil offense, like an expensive parking ticket, but the production and distribution of marijuana would still be criminal. This is an important measure of justice in that the conduct of using marijuana is not wrong and therefore is outside the authority of the state to punish. (A minor civil offense would be an expression of social disapproval. Decriminalization in that sense assumes that we need the justice system to express such disapproval -- which society does not employ to express disapproval in the case of tobacco use.) In this situation, the demand part of the market would not really be restrained, but the supply side would remain criminal. The costs of that approach would not be reduced.
In another sense, decriminalization could be understood as simply the abolition of a local or state law regarding marijuana as a product, and that behavior involving the use of marijuana -- such as before driving, or in parks or at schools or smoking it among non-consenting persons would be restrained by law more generally about controlling driving, use of parks, or inflicting smoke on the air of persons who don't want smoky air. I support that kind of decriminalization as well as legalization of the production and distribution.