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In the last decade alone the number of the incarcerated in the United States has doubled. By mid-year 1994, for the first time in U.S. history, the number of people in prison spiraled past the one million mark (Beck and Bonczar 1994). In 1995, within the federal prison population of 101,000, one in five inmates is a low-level drug offender with no history of violence (Drug Strategies 1996). Many Americans rationalized these numbers with the belief that our high imprisonment rates demonstrated that the United States was achieving real progress in the battle against crime. This analysis, however, explodes that premise, showing how much of our imprisonment increases have been counterproductive because we are simply locking up a large number of low priority, non-violent drug offenders. The Justice Department reports that, at the federal level, drug offenders make up more than 60 percent of the prison population; in local and state jails, drug arrests account for 21 percent of inmates (Beck and Bonczar 1994; Bureau ofJustice Statistics 1989). America's anti-crime strategy has had these results because it is simply a rehashing of the war on drugs. Without a clear indication from the research community of how drugs are related to criminal violence, policy-makers have created laws that can only blindly strike at the drugs/violence connection; in the process, they have created a criminal justice crisis.
Assessing the Drug/Crime Connection
In recent years, some analysts have disputed the connections that other researchers have established between drugs and violent crime, claiming that we need to revise this subject entirely. Samuel Walker, in the book Sense and Nonsense About Crime and Drugs (1994), explains that in the '60s there was a rise in the number of prison-prone males between the ages of 15-24 which, importantly, coincided with the advent of a youth drug culture. In response to such a rise in the prison-prone, and by extension a rise in the number of crimes committed, mandatory minimum sentencing was introduced as a "cure all" for crime. Walker's demographic information is certainly supported by a number of scholars; however, many find his interpretation of America's crime wave as demographic phenomenon unpalatable, believing it is an attempt to explain away the rise in criminal activity in the United States over the past several decades. Despite these allegations, Walker's analysis of the drug/crime phenomena deserves a closer look. As he predicted, when the '60s prison-prone group aged out of the age bracket of high crime commission, American crime rates went down. Over the past decade, Americans have seen a decrease in the number of overall crimes, but a recent rise in violent crime as the baby boom swells the teenage population.
Experts have been of limited help in assisting policy-makers to make determinations about the drugs/crime relationship. For more than 50 years, researchers have been struggling to flesh out the connections between drugs and violent crime, more often complicating our understanding than adding insight. This analysis utilizes the scholarly framework of Paul Goldstein's Tripartite Model for assessing the connections between drugs and violent crime. Goldstein's three-tiered model is used to help explain why our current anti-crime, anti-drug strategy, with its emphasis on mandatory minimum sentencing, is not only ill-suited for severing the drugs/violent crime connection but may, in fact, facilitate its operation. Given this clear model of the drugs/violent crime connection, one can see why, despite the fact that our tough criminal justice policies have led to a 170 percent increase in incarceration levels since the '60s, FBI director Louis J. Freeh (1995) reports that violent crime has increased by 567 percent over the same period.
Whereas previous models were fairly simplistic, Goldstein's Tripartite Conceptual Framework, gives us three ways of describing the relationship between violent crime and drugs: 1) drugs and violence can be said to have psychopharmacological connections when, "as a result of short- or long-term ingestion of specific substances, an individual exhibit(s) violent behavior"; 2) economic-compulsive connections are present when "drug users engage in violent crime (e.g., mugging) in order to support costly drug use"; and 3) systemic connections are present when one sees violence as a result of "the traditionally aggressive patterns of interaction within the system of drug distribution and use" (Goldstein 1995, pp. 256-258). Ironically, Goldstein's model is quite similar to the description of drug-related crime developed by the U.S. Department ofJustice.1 However, rather than fleshing out how each of these previously described drugs/crime connections are related to violence, the Justice Department collapses psychopharmacological, economic-compulsive, and systemic violence into the single category of drug-related violence. In relying on this system, Justice Department researchers squander their opportunity to examine more systematically the phenomena of violent drug-associated crime.
Psychopharmacological violence, the first type of drug-related violence in Goldstein's model, has gotten the most public attention. Media coverage is peppered with stories of crazed illicit drug users who, as a result of their delusional states, engage in acts of random violence and prey upon average people who are far removed from the drug trade. Despite the frequency with which these stories appear in news reports, researchers have found that the psychopharmacological effects of drugs have been greatly overestimated and that drug use in and of itself does not motivate crime (Nurco, Kinlock and Hanlon 1995, p. 224). Criminologists Neely Teeters and Harry Barnes explain that "alarmist literature and the propaganda of crusaders against drug addiction have created a grossly exaggerated impression of the danger to society from the drug user" (Nurco et al. 1995, p. 224). Therefore, when the Drug Use Forecasting Network announces that 50- 70 percent of those arrested are under the influence of substances at the time they commit their crimes, many people, struck by a wave of fear, never stop to assess what kinds of crimes drug users are committing (many are simply possession crimes), or how serious they are (many are non-violent).
Although psychopharmacological violence occurs relatively infrequently, the perception that drug users are psychotic and dangerous when under the influence of substances is firmly lodged into policy-makers' minds. To reflect this position, criminal justice policy has developed the "criminal model of addiction" which holds that drug use causes crime. The criminal model of addiction regards addicts as confirmed criminals who endanger society by their anti-social behavior (Nurco et al. 1995, p. 224). Harry Anslinger was an ardent believer in the criminal model; while serving as the nation's first drug czar from 1930-1962 he helped shape modern fears about psychopharmacologicallybased violent crime (Nurco et al. 1995, p. 224). Although statistics show that the vast majority of addict crimes (about 97.2 percent) can be attributed to other causes and are not violent, much of the public support for today's criminal justice policies come from people's perceptions of and fears about psychopharmacological violence. For example, the vast disparities in federal crack cocaine and powder cocaine sentences, with Crack earning sentences 100 times more harsh than powder cocaine ones, are, in part, due to people's fears about the violence typically associated with a crack high.
The 100-to-1 disparity in crack and powder cocaine sentences has recently come under consideration with new proposals by the U.S. Sentencing Commission to equalize those sentences, increasing the penalties for powder cocaine to those of crack cocaine. Congress, for the first time, voted against the proposed changes, and President Clinton signed a bill on October 30 that effectively blocks the U.S. Sentencing Commission amendments from taking effect. President Clinton has however mentioned that he might support proposals that toughen powder cocaine sentences. (NDSN 1995).
Systemic violence and economic-compulsive violence, the second and third types of violence accounted for in Goldstein's model, are increasingly getting public attention. Goldstein explains that the emphasis on systemic violence is justified, as this form accounts for much of the violence people associate with drugs. Goldstein comments, "drug use, the drug business, and the violence connected to all these phenomena, are all aspects of the same general life-style" (Goldstein 1985, p. 262). Much of systemic violence comes from the fact that drug dealers and traffickers have developed a market entirely outside of formal systems of arbitration and commerce (e.g., the courts) and, as a result, have developed a subcultural system that relies on the threat of violence to encourage compliance. In other ethnographic work, Goldstein vividly portrays how violence permeates drug users and dealers lives. Statistical and demographic data provide further proof that the black market system of drug distribution does incipiently carry with it a significant portion of violence. Police officers in Washington, D.C., estimate that 21 percent of the homicides in the city are systemically drug-related.
Economic-compulsive violence (e.g., mugging) is also especially relevant, as these are the kind of opportunistic and predatory crimes that the average non-drug using citizen seems most concerned about.2 Criminologist James Inciardi has collected data on the prevalence and seriousness of economic-compulsive crime. After surveying a sample of 573 addict offenders, he found that their rates of crime commission were high: his survey showed that the group had committed 215,105 separate illegal acts. However, most of the crimes that these addict offenders committed were non-violent thefts and robberies, sex-work, low-level drug possession crimes, and drug sales. A similar study showed equivalent rates, with addict criminals committing 157 crimes per year, most of these non-violent. As for how high the rate of violence was, Inciardi found that only 2.8 percent of the surveyed addicts' crimes were violent; although once this percentage is converted into real numbers, one realizes that the group would have committed 6,000 violent crimes last year (Nurco et al. 1995, p.230).
Given the high levels of addict crime, many people are understandably concerned. However, data of this sort helps us to contextualize the information coming from the Justice Department; although the rates of crime commission are high, for the most part addicts abstain from gratuitously violent behavior. To contextualize this information further, researchers should begin to examine these figures in light of the rates of violent crime among non-drug using offenders. What we do know now about addict violent crimes is that the general public is insulated from much of this violence. For many drug users, violence is enacted against other addicts and people involved in the alternative econo mies associated with the drug trade. In a 1993 survey of violent offenders, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) found that 61 percent said that they or their victims were under the influence of a substance at the time of the attack; 30 percent say they were certain their victims were under the influence. Understanding that much of this violence occurs in a relatively isolated community should not be taken to mean that we should not take addict-onaddict violence seriously. Rather, understanding why and how these crimes are committed is essential for understanding why our criminaljustice policies are not having the kind of impact we might have expected.
Researchers in favor of harm reduction have consistently expressed a great deal of interest in exploring the basis for systemic and economic-compulsive violence. Harm reductionists realize that poverty often drives addicts to the commission of crime to support their habits (as explained by the economic-compulsive component of the model) and also realize that drug traffickers have a large economic incentive to ruthlessly protect their markets (as explained by the systemic component). Many harm reductionists believe that Goldstein's model effectively accounts for how much of drug-related violence is not incident to drug use at all, but, rather, is a function of economics. Once attention is drawn to the economic components of the drug problem, some harm reductionists believe that policy-makers will understand why a benign form of government intervention, directly focused at controlling this market, could help us reduce drug-related crime. Many harm reduction supporters argue that the current emphasis on enforcement only preserves the illegal market for fierce competitors, and encourages criminal addicts to remain hidden, committing petty crimes to support their addictions (Nadelmann 1992; Reuter 1992, 1995; DesJarlais 1995).
Current Strategies
In the late '80s and '90s, mainstream policymakers also began to take note of the systematic and economic-compulsive variants of drug-related violence. However, rather than explore the basis for this activity, they fell back on an old criminal justice strategy as a means for immediate intervention: incapacitation (Walker 1994, p. 95; Lurigio and Petersilia 1992, pp. 60-62). They began to pass mandatory minimum laws and sentencing guidelines, designed to lock up drug dealers and drug traffickers for long sentences. In recent years, they have been particularly interested in increasing sentences for persons who carry guns during the commission of their crimes; the 1995 version of the crime bill features several of these new laws. The symbolic message of these new laws seems clear. The federal government's decision to assign the death penalty for certain drug trafficking crimes shows that these felons are "public enemy number-one." The new federal drug trafficking sentences, specifically those involving drive-by shootings, earn penalties equal to crimes like genocide, wrecking trains, hostage-taking, crimes involving explosive materials, "espionage," and "murder for hire."' They believe that systemic violence will decrease because dealers will fear arming themselves in light of these increased penalties, just as they believe that the threat of law works to reduce their drug trafficking.
Economic-compulsive violence, the kinds of muggings and robberies and the kind of crime that affect the vast majority of citizens subject to violence, are also addressed by mandatory minimum laws. The new "three strikes you're out" laws specifically address these crime phenomena, imprisoning addicts for life after their third felony violation. In the federal system, the felony must be a serious violent one. Pointedly however, the crimes that addicts are most often guilty of — theft, robbery, and low level drug distribution — qualify in many states for these strikes. Addicts subject to these laws also find that possession arrests, a danger they face almost daily, count as one or two of the three strikes that will earn them a life sentence. "Three strikes you're out" seems about to become the law of the land. This kind of legislation was passed in 14 states, and its now pending in seven more (National Conference of State Legislatures). Even in those states where these offenders do not face the "three strikes you're out" laws, the vast majority of economic-compulsive drug users spend lengthy terms in jail for possession crimes; at the federal level, the mandatory minimums and sentencing guidelines for possession can draw a sentence of anywhere from 5 to 20 years. The 1994 Crime Act makes possession an even more dangerous exigency for addicts, as it allows judges to use prior drug felony convictions as supporting justification for imposing a death sentence on addict felons.4
Problematizing Current Policies
Some would contend that there is nothing wrong with our current policy; illicit drug use is against the law. Therefore, we should not balk when we learn that high numbers of addicts are being sent to jail. Indeed, the White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy shows that these new laws are drawing more addicts into the criminal justice system. In 1988, 200,000 addicts were behind bars, but, in 1993, 400,000 were imprisoned, despite the fact that the number of hard-core heroin and cocaine users remained relatively the same (near three million) between 1988 and 1993. Current policy advocates might also point to the fact that many crime rates are down. Data from the National Crime Victimization Survey show that over the past 15 years, many crimes have decreased: robbery dropped by 17.2 percent, rape by 11.6 percent, household theft by 42.1 percent, and crime inflicted on the elderly by 61 percent (Walker 1994, p. 5). Apparently, our incarceration policy is having some effect; some crimes are going down. Policy supporters would argue: why tinker with a policy that is working? However, despite these limited gains, several questions remain unanswered: Why, if other crime levels are going down, do some violent crime levels continue to escalate? At what cost, have we made these limited gains? Can this policy continue to be effective?
Demographic and statistical information prove key in addressing these concerns. Figures from the BJS showing that the fastest growing group in jails and prisons are non-violent drug users partially explain why our violence problems continue and threaten to grow more serious in coming years. Figures from the California Legislative Analysts Office bolster the conclusion that American jails aro filling up with non-violent felons; 70 percent of those incarcerated last year under these mandatory minimum laws were non-violent offenders. Most alarmingly, women are becoming the fastest growing group behind bars, 64,400 currently serving sentences of more than one year in federal and state prisons, and they are more likely than male offenders to be non-violent with no criminal history or involvement in trafficking (Drug Strategies 1996). Unfortunately, it seems that the initiatives taken to toughen the drug laws, while very good at catching non-violent felons, do not seem particularly effective in catching the most dangerous ones. These new drug laws are enacting a phenomenon called net-widening' and are expanding the category of criminals we keep in jail (Walker 1994, pp. 213-214).
Judge Lois Forer documents the net-widening process in her book A Rage to Punish (1994). She documents that, through the '70s and '80s, Congress passed more than 60 laws lengthening criminal sentences and instituting mandatory sentencing systems and that the states followed suit (Forer 1994, p. 9). The results of these changes are clear. In the last 15 years, anti-drug policies have become meaner and have more teeth; it is now far easier for offenders to be convicted of a drug crime than policies of 30 years ago. For example, initiatives have been taken in Florida to liberalize descriptions of drug-related crimes; some states have instituted more permissive rules governing the types of admissible evidence (Halsted 1992, p. 208). Since the 1974 introduction of mandatory minimums, the incarceration level has, by 1992, gone up more than 170 percent, and, since 1990, the total number of persons under correctional supervision exceeds 4.3 million (Walker 1994, p. 9). Felons also saw their time-served increase. From 1980 to 1992, the average drug-related sentence increased from 47 months to 82 months; other criminal sentences increased from 44 months to 62 months (U.S. Dept. of Justice 1994b, p. 2). As we lock up more and more addict offenders for lesser crimes, and give them longer sentences, prisons have seen an enormous surge in population levels. In one sense, we are making a dent in the crime problem; however, the emphasis seems to be on the kinds of non-violent, petty crimes that Americans should have little concern about.
Simply documenting that the United States is incarcerating more non-violent drug offenders does not reveal its relationship to violent crime. However, when one considers the limited pool of criminal justice resources, a possible relationship becomes clear. The sentencing initiatives designed to cut down on drug offenses have compromised the country's ability to deal with violent crime in a number of ways. Drug offenders have virtually clogged the criminal justice system. Police attention and resources have been diverted from violent crime to address a sea of low-level possession offenders. Similarly, court dockets are now choked with drug cases. However, we face our most critical resource problems in the area of prison space. Although legislators believed that they were helping by creating sentencing guidelines to keep petty drug offenders in prison for long terms, in practice corrections officials have found that often there is not enough prison space to do so. Therefore, in order to warehouse these usually non-violent drug offenders, corrections officials have had to clear prison space by paroling violent felons who are eligible for parole (Skovron 1988, p. 184). As a result, we have a prison system that is dumping vio lent offenders onto our streets in the effort to accommodate more non-violent offenders.
When we assess the cost effectiveness of our current criminal justice policy toward drugs, we are given good reason to pause. Criminal justice officials have long known that simply locking up all those who commit crime is expensive. Prison cells cost about $100,000 to construct; furthermore, housing each offender costs the government anywhere from $25,000 to $40,000 a year. Criminologists have searched for ways to strain through the pool of offenders to insure that scarce criminal justice resources are used wisely. While they know that hard-core users commit a disproportionate amount of our crime, they also know it is entirely unfeasible to consider incarcerating all of them. Daniel Murray and Richard Benjamin explained back in 1993 that there were too many addicts to even consider a strategy that American prisons were ill-equipped to handle. In 1995, this incarceration strategy is impossible (Currie 1993, pp. 151-152). If we were to seriously consider incarcerating all hard-core users, we would have to imprison 2.1 million hard-core cocaine users and 500,000 hard-core heroin users. If we were to incarcerate occasional users as well, we would have to incarcerate another four million cocaine users, and 230,000 heroin users. Collectively, this accounts 6.83 million people, and these figures do not include those involved in the drug trade that do not use drugs. Despite the faulty logic of this policy, and its fiscal impossibility, figures from the Office of National Drug Control Policy show that our current laws are going after addicts with a vengeance. The reality is that if we continue with this strategy, the prison and jail systems will collapse under the pressure.
Furthermore, what policy-makers are afraid to tell the public, addict offenders already know — incarceration is not a real threat in the drug-addicted criminal's mind. An addict who commits an average 357 illegal acts a year — of which the vast majority are possession and low-level sales crimes — runs less than a one percent chance of being caught each time (Currie 1993, pp. 154-156 ). The high volume of addict crimes lessens their perceived risk of a singular criminal act (Currie, p. 157). Indeed, even incarceration itself does not pose much of a tragedy. Addicts find they can still get drugs in jail, and, as Matthew Silberman explains in A World of Violence (1995), prisons often function as a place to enhance one's capabilities of criminal activity. Furthermore, he explains, the prison community is based on violence; prisoners find that violence is necessary for survival. Relying on violent interactions in the prison culture can breed violence when the person is released.
Why Change What's Working?
Die-hard incarceration advocates and even more moderate readers might still argue that to say that petty crime is not as important as violent crime, we are "defining deviance away" (Moynihan 1993). They would argue that all lawbreakers should be incarcerated and that we should build the necessary prison space to round up petty criminals like drug consumers and addicts. However, importantly, one should remember that since the focus is on imprisonment, once these addicts are released, they simply return to their previous criminal behavior. Addict offenders show high recidivism rates. In a 1983 study of parole releases, 85 percent of those who were rearrested were brought in on drug, property or public disorder charges (Irwin 1994). Opportunities for drug treatment in prison are slim. While the number of persons in the prison population who admit to substance use or abuse are high (42 percent of federal and 62 percent of state prisoners according to BJS 1994), treatment opportunities are low. Although officials acknowledge the high number of substance abuse problems in the various incarcerated populations, federal prisons only have treatment facilities to serve 14 percent of their populations, and state prisons can only treat 18 percent (Harlow 1992). The U.S. General Accounting Office estimates that less than 20 percent of prisoners with moderate to severe substance abuse problems receive treatment, and, at the federal level, less than one percent do ("Collateral Casualties" 1994). Even those jails that do have programs do not operate them at full capacity. Collectively, out of the more than one million persons incarcerated, federal, state, and local jails only treat 100,200 people each year (Harlow 1992). Bureau of Justice Statistics data reveal that, after being churned through the system a few times, addicts' access to treatment opportunities is slightly better: while at the time of its survey only one in 10 women were receiving treatment, one in three had been in treatment programs sometime in the past. A variety of factors often leads to attrition: relapse, poor treatment design, or treatment that is too abbreviated. Addicts often find that without health insurance, the only way to get into treatment is through the criminal justice system, and even there their chances are limited. Experts from the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation estimate that, last year alone, we spent $6.1 billion to incarcerate addicts, and, given the lawmaker's attitude about making treatment available, we can predict that we will continue to pay to incarcerate addicts. When people learn that we are incarcerating addicts without any attempt to address the reasons these persons began substance use in the first place, they are not so sure that this is an appropriate anti-crime strategy.
In summary, mandatory minimums and sentencing guidelines play an aggravating role rather than an ameliorative one in the addict/offender problem. Under mandatory minimum sentencing, addicts are forced to simply serve out the length of their sentence with no special provisions. The criminal justice system cannot take advantage of the fact that most criminal behavior occurs between the ages of 15-24 and therefore, it is neither cost-effective, nor ethical to keep older addicts in jail when their potential for criminal activity has essentially passed (Walker 1994, p. 13). Judges acknowledge that treatment opportunities in jails are slim, but cannot divert addicts to treatment options outside of prison because of these mandatory guidelines. Consequently, they are forced to send non-violent addicts to jail despite the fact that treatment, costing only $9,000 a year, would be a more cost-effective and ethically appropriate sentence for them.
Rather than sentence non-violent addicts to jail, some judges have revolted outright. Frightened by some of the obscene scenarios that result from mandatory sentencing guidelines, 50 of the 100 senior federal judges, exercising their right to refuse to hear certain cases, have opted not to take any drug cases at all. In A Rage to Punish (1994) , Judge Lois Forer explains that Federal Judge Lawrence Irving of San Diego resigned to protest these laws and that U.S. District Judges Jack Weinstein and Whitman Knapp have also refused to hear these cases." Judge Carol J. Fieldhouse of the Los Angeles Superior Court represented their position well when she explained, "I refuse to dispense injustice. I wasn't put here to annihilate people because some politically hungry morons wanted to" (National Drug Strategy Network (NDSN) 1994, p. 25). Other judges have complied with the law, but expressed from the bench the belief that these sentences are unfair (Forer 1994, p. 5). Still other judges hâve simply refused to comply with the letter of the law, allowing alterations in the sentence charged so that offenders will serve a sentence that is substantially lower than that prescribed by the minimum (NDSN 1994, p. 25). Lois Forer was one of the judges who pursued this course of action, but her decision was overturned by the Supreme Court. The experience prompted her to write her book. In addition, Harold H. Green of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., also refused to implement the drug laws as prescribed. Furthermore, in California, prosecutors and judges are colluding to avoid the mandatory third-strike laws by referring potential third strike felony arrestees to be referred to the parole board for parole violations; instead of a 25-year sentence, the arrestee serves one year. Judges also use their discretion to discount or ignore the second or third strike in "three strikes you're out" cases. Prosecutors are also rebelling by selecting the cases presented to their offices, using unstated, informal declinations to decide which cases will be prosecuted and which crimes are of too minute importance to pursue.
Finding Other Options
Many dissenting officials in the criminal justice system have argued that a combination treatment/ probation policy would be a good start for addressing the unique problems a non-violent drug offender presents to the criminal justice system. The Office of National Drug Control Policy has also taken this stand, attempting to make treatment a central part of its 1995 National Drug Control Strategy. Unfortunately, many people still believe that incapacitating an offender is the only way to address the drug problem. Scholars like Joan Petersilia and Arthur Lurigio, while they support intermediate sanctions, emphasize a continuum of control strategies, ranging from day centers to boot camps to intense and electronic surveillance (Petersilia 1988, pp. 167-177). However, studies have demonstrated that these types of programs are guilty of net-widening as well; they tend to bring more people under state control rather than push people out of the criminal justice system (Petersilia 1988). Ironically, Petersilia discredits treatment and rehabilitation despite the fact that the data show that treatment, and the supportive follow-up aspects of probation and rehabilitation programs seem to be the main reasons for offenders' improvement (Byrne, Lurigio and Petersilia 1992, p. xiv). Indeed, policy-makers' wholehearted support of incapacitation policies, even when they have substantial data that treatment is cheaper and more effective, explains why the states are in dire economic straits. Although it would be far cheaper to offer addict offenders opportunities for employment and treatment rather than warehousing them in expensive cell space, many policy-makers remain wedded to the drugs equals crime rationale. It is incredibly difficult for them to make the transition to alternative ways of addressing the addict population.
Given our understanding of the various relationships between drugs and crime, and the ineffectiveness of the punitive measures used to interrupt these connections, one grows more skeptical about our continued, almost exclusive reliance on incarceration strategies. Over the past decade, research has shown that our reliance on incarceration to fight the drug war has been: expensive, costing anywhere from $25,000 to $40,000 a year per inmate; ineffective, because mandatory sentencing detain felons long after they have aged beyond criminal-activity behavior (Lanagan 1991, pp. 1568- 1573) ; unproductive, because prison culture teaches felons violent and anti-social behavior (Silberman 1995, pp. xi-xii); and unethical, because despite our reliance on drug use to indicate criminal potential, there are no reliable ways to predict which felons would actually commit more crime (Walker 1994, pp. 75-86).
The National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences recently concluded that a tripling of the time served by violent offenders since 1975 had "apparently very little impact on violent crime" (CBS News Special Report 1995). Unfortunately, the public's fear of crime bears little relation to crime statistics. Over the past 20 years, at any given time, 50 percent of the American people believed crime was on the increase, despite the fact that studies show it was going down. People's fear of crime has supported their desire for strict criminal justice measures in the past; and, it is quite likely that these measures will continue to find support. This analysis tries to begin the dialogue, encouraging policy-makers and the public to re-examine how our tough policies are actually quite soft on the most violent among us, to consider the huge expense associated with our current policy, and to consider the repercussions of incarcerating this fairly large subsection of non-violent petty offenders. In short, Americans need to begin to consider how our anticrime/anti-drugs laws are undermining effective usage of our criminal justice resources. If we can begin to address these issues on a factual basis, we have a far better chance of creating a criminal justice policy that reflects our moral hopes, addresses our fears, and takes into account our actual capabilities. •
The authors are grateful to Janine Treves for assistance in editorial critique and revision, and to Dr David Duncan for helpful suggestions in preparation of the manuscript.
Camile Gear was a research assistant at the Center for Alcoholism and Addiction at Brown University, Box GBH, Providence, RI 02912, and is now attending Yale Law School. Dr David Lewis is the director of the Center for Alcoholism and Addiction and is a member of the Drug Policy Foundation's Board of Directors.
Notes
1 'The U.S. Department ofJustice has two other legs in its model of the drugs/crime connection: drug-defined offenses (possession offenses), and drug-using life-style (a designation that asserts that drug users are living "deviant life-styles" and, as a result, are exposed to more criminal activities and develop attitudes that encourage the commission of crime). U.S. Department of Justice "Drug-Related Crime." Fact Sheet, Sept. 1994. NCJ-149286.
2 Researchers have done additional work to further gage the prevalence and seriousness of the economic-compulsive facet of the drugs/violent crime phenomena. David Nurco, Timothy Kinlock and Thomas Hanlon, 'The Drugs Crime Connection" in The American Drug Scene (1995, pp. 224- 235) take steps to differentiate between addicts to show that there are addicts who, despite their addiction, do not commit crime; addicts who commit crime to support their addiction; and addicts who were criminal before their addictions and simply continue to commit crime. They expand Goldstein's category of the economic-compulsive, drug-using criminal creating several, more nuanced categories. Still, the attitude in most criminal justice circles is that despite addicts' justifications for their crimes, the principal concern of lawmakers should be to assess the prevalence and seriousness of the crimes that addicts commit. However, until policy-makers create programs that explore the root causes and motivations for addicts' criminal acts, our criminal justice/anti-drug policies will never adequately function to reduce crime.
3 See sections 60003-60025 in the 1994 draft of the federal Crime Bill; specifically sections 60013, "Death Penalty For Gun Murders During Federal Crimes Of Violence And Drug Trafficking Crimes"; 60023, "Weapons Of Mass Destruction"; and 60022, "Terrorist Death Penalty Act."
4 See 1994 Draft of federal Crime Bill, Section 6000: "Aggravating Factor Encouraging Death Penalty," which states that aggravating factors are present when "the defendant has previously been convicted of 2 or more state or federal offenses punishable by a term of imprisonment of more than one year, committed on different occasions, involving the distribution of a controlled substance."
5 Net-widening is strictly defined as attempts to widen the scope of people subject to government control or supervision. However, in this case, it can be used to describe the sentencing of drug offenders, for the types of sentences that are levied and the amounts of time served both fulfill the stated imperatives of net-widening. Samuel Walker, Sense and Nonsense About Crime and Drugs (1994, pp. 213-214).
6 See also —Three Strikes You're Out' Striking Out With California Judges." National Drug Strategy Network: Newsbriefs VI (5) Nov. 1994, p. 25.
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