There was once a time when the United States was not the country with the greatest number of people locked up in jail, when our prison population did not rival Stalin's gulags at their height. For the most part, we weren't much different from other developed countries and had fairly stable incarceration rates throughout the 20th century. However that began to change within the last quarter of the century, when an unpopular president named Richard Nixon who, according to a top advisor, first waged the "War on Drugs" as a means of striking back at his political rivals, particularly African Americans and counter-culture liberals protesting against the Vietnam War. Over time, the War on Drugs became an increasingly entrenched and bipartisan issue within the political establishment, as future presidents like Republican Ronald Reagan and Democratic Bill Clinton would attest. Their administrations in particular fostered a rapid growth of the prison complex to accommodate the ever-accelerating number of non-violent offenders being punished at the hands of draconian legislation.
Since the early 1980s, this era of rapaciously arresting people (disproportionately African American males) at will has become the normalized state of affairs that we just accept as a part of life. However in the past couple of years we've been seeing signs that this unsustainable practice is now struggling under its own weight. Prison overcrowding has become a major issue as the number of prisons has not caught up with the nearly endless flow of nonviolent drug-users being shuffled in. States like California for example have responded to this crisis with efforts to reduce the number of those incarcerated to more functionally sound levels. In 2014, California voters passed Prop 47, an initiative designed to downgrade certain drug and property crimes from felonies to misdemeanors, and it appears to have had an effect on the state's prison and jail populations.
With the issue of people taking certain types of illegal drugs now classified in California as a misdemeanor rather than a felony, less nonviolent offenders are being incarcerated and equated with criminals charged with more serious offenses like murder or rape. Ironically, this major step towards criminal justice reform took place in the same state that once served as the home for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, two presidents who actively pursued the "tough on crime" agenda.
Meanwhile on the federal level, the Department of Justice released a statement regarding the status of private prisons, one of the biggest beneficiaries of the drug war. After a report was conducted by the inspector general which concluded that private prisons were no safer or cheaper to maintain than public facilities, the department determined that the federal government would no longer house inmates in these private spaces. Soon enough, a couple of the biggest private prison corporations witnessed a plunge in stock prices after the decision was announced. It could just be a temporary blow to the corporations and the decision does not affect private prisons on the state or local level, but it is a step in the right direction and has potential of influencing the states to act on this issue as well.
In fact, some states have already or are about to act on whether to legalize marijuana within their jurisdictions or not, despite its illegality on the federal level. Four states (Alaska, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington) have already legalized recreational weed, but multiple states are about to vote on the issue this November and some major states like California are poised to vote in favor of legalization. In a state where the medical marijuana industry has thrived for more than 20 years, the legalization of its recreational cousin in California could have a cascading effect on other states to push for the same policies as well. With cannabis being especially profitable in its illegal state, having the cash crop decriminalized and legalized throughout the country would deal the drug war a devastating blow from which it may never recover.
If these signs are any indication, the War on Drugs might be coming to an end sooner than people realize, which will then allow us to move towards a more fair and just system in the long run.
