There is no such thing as a victimless crime. Unfortunately, the sheer volume of lower level, misdemeanor crime significantly overwhelms the criminal justice system, as more than 1.5 million drug arrests are made annually here in the United States (FBI 2015). Roughly fifty thousand people are currently incarcerated in state prisons for minor possession cases (Carson. 2015). The decriminalization of these offenses, such as “drug crimes” would result in the greatest deduction of volume of cases, but would not attempt to control the volume of victims in such cases. Approximately forty-four thousand people die from overdoses each year, which is significantly larger than the volume of victims of school shootings (Martin. 2015). Beyond the immediate victims of drug crimes, such as the individuals using the drugs, there resides the transitive victims of drug crimes, such as the children of drug-abusing parents who cannot care for their child in their mental state, or pass on dosages of harmful drugs to their children in the womb or breast-feeding. In spite of this, studies show that countries which have already implemented less punitive policies of drug possession haven’t depicted increases of drug use or drug crime related harm (FBI 2015), suggesting that decriminalization would not further harm these victims. Additionally, decriminalization would result in the movement of the majority of individuals arrested or incarcerated towards drug treatment, while decreasing the volume of informal social control associated with drug use, making asking for help more acceptable within society. The decriminalization of possession would additionally maximize drug-crime related resources towards violent drug crimes and the sale of drugs.
I believe that focusing on youth development programs, such as the Youth Court programs, as well as TOW Youth Justice Institute encourage development rather than detainment of struggling youths, providing them alternatives and positive environments to foster grown and discourage drug usage at a young age will significantly decrease the volume of drug crimes and therefore the volume of cases inundating the system. When crime prevention is moved into a proactive, rather than a reactive system, the volume of crime will decrease (as it has over the past decade) and gradually decrease the volume of cases which must be tried.