Balance the Budget: End the Destructive Drug War

You could spend a couple of years listing the ways the War on Drugs is inefficient, counter-productive, self-destructive, wasteful, unjust, anti-family, budget-busting, crime-increasing, corrupt, authoritarian, anti-democratic, un-american and just plain stupid.

You could spend a couple more years adding up the positive, society-building, economy-stimulating programs you could pay for with the hundreds of billions of dollars spent investigating, arresting and incarcerating people for smoking a joint.

In Kentucky, the extreme budget crisis facing the General Assembly may actually force a rational alternative to wasting $100 million we don't have locking up people who aren't criminals.

Kentucky’s 35-year war on drugs has produced “brutally harsh sentences,” flooded the prison system with non-violent and small-time offenders and helped push the state budget to the “outer edge of fiscal distress,” the author of the state’s penal code says.

An array of penalties and enhancements for drug offenses have crowded the state’s prisons with offenders who pose little risk to others and who are forced to serve lengthy terms that used to be reserved for “society’s worst actors,” University of Kentucky professor Robert Lawson said in a new report on Kentucky’s skyrocketing prison population.

Lawson’s 60-page study, which has been distributed to some legislative leaders, could provide fuel for changing a patchwork of drug punishments that he says have “failed miserably” to distinguish between minor offenders and major traffickers.

Criminal justice officials already have said they support some of Lawson’s recommended changes, though most are expected to face opposition from politicians who don’t want to appear “soft” on crime.

SNIP

About 5,000 of Kentucky’s roughly 22,000 inmates are serving time for drug offenses, where the drug conviction is their most serious offense, according to Lawson’s report — “Drug Law Reform – Retreating from an Incarceration Addiction.” The cost of their incarceration is about $100 million a year, the report states.

Read the whole thing.