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  MaryJane 9:53 pm on January 15, 2012 Permalink  

  US Criminal Justice System 

  Drug Policy Question of the Week – 1-11-12

  As answered by Mary Jane Borden, Editor of Drug War Facts for the Drug Truth Network on 1-11-12. http://www.drugtruth.net/cms/node/3706

  Question of the Week: How many people are under the control of the U.S. criminal justice system?

  An April 2011 report by the Justice Policy Institute begins by stating,

  “The United States is home to the world’s largest prison population. … the U.S. has only 5 percent of the world’s population but holds 25 percent of the world’s prisoners …”

  There are several components to the U.S. criminal justice system. Quoting the Institute,

  “The entry point into the criminal justice system is typically through law enforcement. … In the U.S., when a person is charged with an offense they may be detained in jail until their trial or they may be released to await their trial in the community through a variety of mechanisms … people are said to be “remanded,” which is a summons to appear before a judge at a later date. If they are not released pretrial they can be “remanded to custody” until their court proceeding; if they are convicted, they can be remanded to custody prior to sentencing or during an appeal process … Pretrial detention is associated with a higher likelihood of both being found guilty and receiving a sentence of incarceration over probation, thus forcing a person further into the criminal justice system. In the United States, this is particularly important because of the sheer numbers”

  What are those numbers?

  In 2010 there were approximately:

  4,000,000 people on probation

  840,000 on parole

  207,000 in federal prison

  1,300,000 in state prison

  and 749,000 in local jails

  For a total of 7,100,000 people under the control of the U.S. Criminal Justice system.

  These facts and others like them can be found in the “U.S. Corrections Population” Table in  Prisons & Jails Chapter of Drug War Facts at http://www.drugwarfacts.org.

   
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  MaryJane 9:28 pm on January 15, 2012 Permalink  

  Marijuana Prisoners 

  Drug Policy Question of the Week – 12-19-11

  As answered by Mary Jane Borden, Editor of Drug War Facts for the Drug Truth Network on 12-19-11. http://www.drugtruth.net/cms/node/3677

  Question of the Week: How many people are in prison for marijuana?

  Aficionados will recall that there are important statistics in drug policy that must be computed. These include the number of marijuana arrests and the number of people behind bars for marijuana offenses.

  To calculate the number of “marijuana prisoners,” two reports are necessary.

  Report #1 is “Prisoners in 2004,” from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, Table 1, page 2. Find these numbers:

  Total Federal Prisoners in 2004 =  170,535

  Total State Prisoners in 2004 =  1,244,311

  Report #2 is, “Drug Use and Dependence, State and Federal Prisoners, 2004,” again from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, page. 4. Find these numbers:

  Percent of federal prisoners held for drug law violations in 2004 = 55%

  Percent of state prisoners held for drug law violations in 2004 = 21%

  Marijuana/hashish, Percent of federal drug offenders, 2004 = 12.4%

  Marijuana/hashish, Percent of state drug offenders, 2004 = 12.7%

  Now, do the math,

  Multiply total prisoners times the percent of prisoners held for drug law violations. Then multiply this product times the percentage of marijuana offenders. The result is:

  Federal marijuana prisoners, 2004 = 11,630

  State marijuana prisoners, 2004 = 33,186

  Total federal and state marijuana prisoners in 2004 = 44,816

  Thus, those in prison for marijuana offenses represent about 12.6% of those incarcerated for drug law violations and 3.2% of total state and federal prisoners. It should be noted that these numbers exclude those among the 700,000+ inmates who may be in local jail because of a marijuana arrest.

  These facts and others like them can be found in the Prisons and Drugs Chapter of Drug War Facts at http://www.drugwarfacts.org.

   
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  Matt 1:42 pm on December 13, 2011 Permalink  

  Book Review – A Plague of Prisons 

  
  by Craig Jones Former Executive Director, The John Howard Society of Canada.

  A Plague of Prisons: The Epidemiology of Mass Incarceration in America / By Ernest Drucker, The New Press, 2011, pp. xiv, 211

  Every student of epidemiology learns the story of the Broad Street pump (London, Summer 1854), which marks the birth of epidemiology. In A Plague of Prisons, Ernest Drucker uses that story as a metaphor to explain the explosion of incarceration in the United States that followed the 1973 enactment of the Rockefeller drug laws and to illustrate how political decisions act as vectors – pumps – and how these vectors create a social epidemic of gargantuan proportions. Drucker is professor emeritus of family and social medicine at Montefiore Medical Center/Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He was present at the creation of the AIDS epidemic in the Bronx in the early 1980s and watched how politics, ignorance, homophobia and racism facilitated the transmission of disease from certain neighborhoods and populations to a much larger population via the Riker’s Island prison.

  • URL: http://drugpolicy.ca/2011/12/book-review-a-plague-of-prisons-the-epidemiology-of-mass-incarceration-in-america/
   
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  MaryJane 9:05 pm on October 17, 2011 Permalink  

  Federal Agencies 

  Drug Policy Question of the Week – 10-6-11

  As answered by Mary Jane Borden, Editor of Drug War Facts for the Drug Truth Network on 10-6-11. http://www.drugtruth.net/cms/node/3576

  Question of the Week: What federal agencies enforce drug laws?

  A new table based on a 2009 report from the RAND Corporation can be found in the Drug War Facts Interdiction chapter. This table lists a number of federal agencies that investigate and enforce drug laws. Among these are the United States Department of Defense, the Department of Justice and White House Office of National Drug Control Policy or ONDCP.

  Under the Department of Defense, the Defense Information Systems Agency and its Anti-Drug Network engage in information sharing and data mining. The U.S. Northern Command oversees the continental United States and Alaska. The Joint Task Force North under the Northern Command stops transnational threats like drug smuggling. The U.S. Southern Command operates counterdrug operations in Central and South America. Its Joint Interagency Task Force South prevents illegal trafficking within the Caribbean.

  The Drug Enforcement Administration or DEA has several divisions. Its National Security Intelligence Section interfaces with the intelligence community. The DEA’s Operation Pipeline targets private motor vehicles involved in drug trafficking, with its counterpart, Operation Convoy, handling commercial vehicles. The El Paso Intelligence Center is a major hub for disseminating drug related intelligence data. DEA Mobile Intelligence Units assist state and local drug-enforcement challenges.

  The ONDCP operates 31 High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas or HIDTAs that collect counterdrug intelligence. Each HIDTAs has a Regional Intelligence Center associated with it.

  The Department of Justice’s Organized Crime and Drug Enforcement Task Force focuses major drug-smuggling and money-laundering operations, while the multi-agency National Joint Terrorism Task Force brings together more than three-dozen other government agencies that collect and process terrorist intelligence.

  A graphical map of these and other federal agencies created by the RAND Corporation can be found at the bottom of the aforementioned table.

   
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  MaryJane 9:06 pm on September 10, 2011 Permalink  

  What was the Rainbow Farm? 

  Drug Policy Question of the Week – 9-11-11

  As answered by Mary Jane Borden, Editor of Drug War Facts for the Drug Truth Network in loving memory of all victims of the tragic events that converged on 9-11-01. http://www.drugtruth.net/cms/node/3534

  Question of the Week: What was the Rainbow Farm?

  Paraphrasing a January 2002 Washington Post article entitled “Was Rainbow Farm another Waco?”, the Rainbow Farm was a …

  “34-acre farm and an adjoining 20-acre wood near Vandalia, [Michigan]. [Tom] Crosslin bought the farm … as a place where he and [Rollie] Rohm could escape their urban life. … He turned Rainbow Farm into a campground and began holding pro-pot festivals every Labor Day and Memorial Day weekend.”

  On Friday, August 31, 2001,

  “the building where bands waited to go onstage — was burning. … A helicopter from WNDU-TV in South Bend, Indiana shooting fire footage for the evening news [was told to] leave because the cops said somebody was shooting at them. … On Sunday, the FBI arrived, more than 50 strong, summoned to the scene because the helicopter shooting was a federal crime … John Bell, head of the FBI’s Detroit office … sent three FBI SWAT teams, each composed of three sharpshooters …

  in the woods … at a campsite … two agents fired, one of them shooting Crosslin through the forehead, killing him instantly.”

  Early the next day,

  “two state police snipers fired from 150 yards away.  One missed.  The other shot through the stock of Rohm’s rifle and into his chest, killing him.”

  The Rainbow Farm might have simply been counted among estimated 40,000 paramilitary SWAT raids that occurred in 2001, but in the context of history, it was no ordinary raid.

  It was the harbinger of what was to come.

  Eight days later on September 11, 2001, terrorists hijacked four airliners, flying two of them into the World Trade Center, one into the Pentagon, and one into a Pennsylvania cornfield, killing a total of 2,977 people.

  The 9/11 Commission Report released in 2004 found that FBI priorities were

  “driven at the local level by the field offices, whose concerns centered on traditional crimes such as white-collar offenses and those pertaining to drugs and gangs. … In 2000, there were still twice as many agents devoted to drug enforcement as to counterterrorism.”

  The report concluded,

  “In sum, the domestic agencies never mobilized in response to the threat. … The terrorists exploited deep institutional failings.”

  Perhaps one failing was the drug war.

  These facts and others like them can be found on the Interdiction Chapter of Drug War Facts at http://www.drugwarfacts.org.

   
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  Matt 9:28 am on August 25, 2011 Permalink  

  Too Many Cops? 

  The crime rate is down but police forces are growing. We’re poorer as a result, but not necessarily any safer.

  by Ken MacQueen, and Patricia Treble

  This spring, Tamara Cartwright dropped off an envelope at her local post office outside Lethbridge, Alta. A friend had sent her a jar of hemp-based ointment, so she replied with a thank you card, wrote her name and return address on the envelope and, in a decision certain to haunt her for years to come, enclosed four grams of her homegrown marijuana, enough for perhaps four cigarettes. On an April morning some days later she returned to the post office to pick up another package. Moments later, police pulled her over, handcuffed her, put her in a cruiser and hauled her off to the police station.

  It made quite a spectacle, says the 41-year-old mother of four, who suffers from colitis and is one of more than 10,000 medical marijuana patients registered with Health Canada. “It was embarrassing,” she says. “I was still in my pyjamas.” She emerged four hours later with a trafficking charge for giving away those four grams.

  Her charge is part of a recent marked increase in arrests for cannabis offences. Cannabis arrests jumped 13 per cent in 2010 to 75,126. Of those, almost 57,000 were for simple possession, a 14 per cent jump from the year before. (The statistics reflect cases where the arrest was the most serious charge a person faced, not the thousands more where a pot charge was tacked onto a string of more serious crimes.) The cannabis arrest rate is an anomaly at a time when the overall crime rate in 2010 fell to its lowest level since the mid-1970s.

  Ironically, Cartwright’s legal predicament may be linked to that falling crime rate, which comes at a time when policing costs are climbing relentlessly and the number of sworn officers in Canada is at its highest level in almost 30 years. It may simply be that with less overall crime, police have the time, staffing and inclination to focus on minor drug arrests. The vast majority of those arrested are younger than 24, and mostly male, if past findings hold true. And the majority of those arrests are for pot possession, “the low-lying fruit,” as Dalhousie University criminologist Christopher Murphy puts it.

  • URL: http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/08/25/too-many-cops/
   
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  Matt 6:01 pm on February 11, 2011 Permalink
  Tags: Video (53)   

  Rob Nicholson Defends Bill S-10, Mandatory Minimum Sentencing For Low-Level, Non-Violent Drug Crimes 

   
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  Matt 11:08 am on January 26, 2011 Permalink  

  Border Patrol Agent Fired For Views On Drug Legalization Files Lawsuit 

  By Lucia Graves

  In September of 2009, border patrol agent Bryan Gonzalez was fired for expressing his views on drug legalization to a fellow agent. Now, the American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico has joined Gonzalez in filing a lawsuit on First Amendment grounds seeking unspecified compensatory and punitive damages.

  Gonzalez, 26, alleges that he was dismissed from his job in El Paso, Texas after saying in casual conversation that legalizing and regulating drugs would help stop cartel violence along the southern border with Mexico. His letter of termination stated his comments were “contrary to the core characteristics of Border Patrol Agents, which are patriotism, dedication, and esprit de corps.”

  Gonzalez told his colleague Shawn Montoya in April of 2009 that “legalization of drugs would end the drug war and related violence in Mexico,” adding that “the drug problems in America were due to American demand for drugs supplied by Mexico,” according to the complaint he and the ACLU-NM filed in federal court.

  • URL: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/26/border-patrol-fired-drug-legalization_n_813999.html
   
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  Deb 12:11 am on December 23, 2010 Permalink  

  Pat Robertson Favors Marijuana Legalization 

  By Stephen C. Webster
  Wednesday, December 22nd, 2010

  Count this among the 10 things nobody ever expected to see in their lifetimes: 700 Club founder Pat Robertson, one of the cornerstone figures of America’s Christian right movement, has come out in favor of legalizing marijuana.

  Calling it getting “smart” on crime, Robertson aired a clip on a recent episode of his 700 Club television show that advocated the viewpoint of drug law reformers who run prison outreach ministries.

  A narrator even claimed that religious prison outreach has “saved” millions in public funds by helping to reduce the number of prisoners who return shortly after being released.

  “It got to be a big deal in campaigns: ‘He’s tough on crime,’ and ‘lock ‘em up!’” the Christian Coalition founder said. “That’s the way these guys ran and, uh, they got elected. But, that wasn’t the answer.”

  His co-host added that the success of religious-run dormitories for drug and alcohol cessation therapy present an “opportunity” for faith-based communities to lead the way on drug law reforms.

  “We’re locking up people that have taken a couple puffs of marijuana and next thing you know they’ve got 10 years with mandatory sentences,” Robertson continued. “These judges just say, they throw up their hands and say nothing we can do with these mandatory sentences. We’ve got to take a look at what we’re considering crimes and that’s one of ‘em.

  “I’m … I’m not exactly for the use of drugs, don’t get me wrong, but I just believe that criminalizing marijuana, criminalizing the possession of a few ounces of pot, that kinda thing it’s just, it’s costing us a fortune and it’s ruining young people. Young people go into prisons, they go in as youths and come out as hardened criminals. That’s not a good thing.”
  (More …)

  • URL: http://www.cbn.com/media/player/index.aspx?s=/Archive/Club/700Club121610_WS&WT.mc_id=EmbedPlayer
   
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  MaryJane 11:17 pm on December 18, 2010 Permalink  

  How large is the U.S. prison population? 

  Drug Policy Question of the Week – 11-9-10

  As answered by Mary Jane Borden, Editor of Drug War Facts for the Drug Truth Network on 11-9-10. http://www.drugtruth.net/cms/node/3138

  Question of the Week: How large is the U.S. prison population?

  According to an April 2010 study from the Pew Center on the States,

  “Survey data … indicate that as of January 1, 2010, there were 1,404,053 persons under the jurisdiction of state prison authorities, 4,777 (0.3 percent) fewer than there were on December 31, 2008. This marks the first year-to-year drop in the state prison population since 1972.”

  However, the report goes on to say,

  “In this period, however, the nation’s total prison population increased by 2,061 people because of a jump in the number of inmates under the jurisdiction of the Federal Bureau of Prisons. The federal count rose by 6,838 prisoners, or 3.4 percent in 2009, to an all-time high of 208,118.”

  Added together, total state and federal prisoners now equal 1.6 million.

  The Pew Center then added local jail inmates to state and federal prisoners to conclude,

  “the overall incarcerated population [has] reached an all-time high, with 1 in 100 adults in the United States living behind bars.”

  A 2007 report from the International Center for Prison Studies compared prison ratios by country. It found that, excluding the U.S., countries with the highest incarceration rates included Russia (629 per 100,000), Rwanda (604 per 100,000), and Cuba (531 per 100,000).

  That report goes on to read,

  “The world population in 2008 is estimated at 6,750 million; set against a world prison population of 9.8 million this produces a world prison population rate of 145 per 100,000.”

  Recall that the comparative U.S. imprisonment rate is now 1,000 per 100,000.

  These facts and others like them can be found in the Prisons, Jails & Probation chapter of Drug War Facts at http://www.drugwarfacts.org.

  Questions concerning these or other facts concerning drug policy can be e-mailed to mjborden@drugwarfacts.org