A catching sickness

A Plague of Prisons: The Epidemiology of Mass Incarceration in America. By Ernest Drucker. The New Press; 211 pages; $26.95. Buy from Amazon.com

IN MAY 1973 New York passed a set of laws that required judges to impose sentences of 15 years to life imprisonment for anyone convicted of selling two ounces (57 grams) or possessing four ounces of “narcotic drugs”—usually cocaine, heroin or marijuana. They came to be known as the Rockefeller laws, after New York's then-governor, Nelson Rockefeller. They sent New York's prison population soaring, from an average of fewer than 75 inmates per 100,000 New Yorkers between 1880 and 1970 to five times that rate by the end of the century. Between 1987 and 1997 drug cases accounted for 45% of new prisoners.

Other states followed New York's lead. They imposed long sentences for non-violent drug crimes and they denied judges the power to consider extenuating circumstances, or indeed anything other than the convict's criminal history and the amount of drugs, when sentencing.

These laws were a public-policy disaster. Ernest Drucker, an epidemiologist, uses the tools of his trade to examine the laws and their consequences. He writes that America is suffering “a plague of prisons”, and the Rockefeller laws were the outbreak of that plague. Heroin use rose in New York during the 1960s. New York politicians wanting to convince their constituents that they were tough on crime, sent users and sellers to prison for a long time.

The pattern was repeated around the country. As a result, America's prison population, like New York's, rose fivefold from 1980 to 2009. The impact has been particularly strong in poor and minority communities: one in 11 black adults are under correctional supervision, compared with one in 45 whites. And 25% of children in much of Harlem and the South Bronx have had one of their parents imprisoned.

This does not indicate a violent-crime problem: in the South Bronx, only 3% of convictions are for felonies. The most common arrests are for loitering, vagrancy or drug use or possession. Collectively, these low-level, “quality of life” crimes account for nearly half of all arrests.

The arrests themselves, in Mr Drucker's telling, represent an initial infection of sorts. They are “the seeds for most imprisonments”: they result in a suspect being taken to a police station, fingerprinted, jailed (in American parlance, jail is for pre-trial detention or short-term sentences; prison is for longer stays), brought before a judge, and having a criminal record established. Even these short periods of detention can result in losing jobs, housing or, particularly for women, custody of their children. As for those children, they themselves run a far higher risk of ending up in prison than the children of unincarcerated parents. The neighbourhoods in which they live end up permanently destabilised by the frequent circulation of adults in and out of prison.

None of Mr Drucker's statistics or stories is new, but they bear repeating because they are unjust, unintended and easily remedied. Treating drug addiction as a public-health problem (emphasising treatment and harm-reduction) rather than a crime to be punished would go a long way towards making America's poor and minority communities stabler and better. It would also save taxpayers money. All that is lacking is political will.