Jacob Sullum reports on the Atlasphere that:
The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that drug offenders account for about 25 percent of local jail inmates, 21 percent of state prisoners and 55 percent of federal prisoners. Since 1980 the number of drug offenders in state prisons has increased by 1,200 percent, more than four times the increase in violent offenders. … According to the U.S. Sentencing Commission, however, only one in ten federal crack offenses involves violence or the threat of violence. … Research conducted by criminologist John DiIulio, economist Anne Morrison Piehl, and sociologist Bert Useem in the late 1990s found that many, if not most, people sentenced for drug crimes in New York, Arizona, and New Mexico were “drug-only offenders,” meaning the only crimes they’d ever committed involved the voluntary exchange of politically incorrect intoxicants for money.
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