Drugs: The Legalization Debate

**Uboat509** · 11-11-2008

Originally Posted by reed11b

One way of factoring the cost would be to look at the cost of keep an individual incarcerated for a year, and then count the number of convicts incarcerated on mandatory drug laws for marijuana. According to most sites, like this one, the cost is between $20,000 to $40,000 a year. The estimation of # of marijuana users confined primarly for marijuana offenses is 1 in 7 or 1 in 8 of all prisoners or 40,000 individuals. This equals approx $800,000,000 to 1.6B.
Saying that we are spending a Billion dollars a year on marijuana enforcement is probably being very conservative.
Reed
P.S. That 40,000 is State and Federal prisoners only. There are no compiled records on how many of the 600,000 local prisoners are there for marijuana offenses.

I did find this document.

In 1997, the year for which the most recent data are available, just 1.6 percent of the state inmate population were held for offenses involving only marijuana, and less than one percent of all state prisoners (0.7 percent) were incarcerated with marijuana possession as the only charge, according to the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). An even smaller fraction of state prisoners in 1997 who were convicted just for marijuana possession were firsttime offenders (0.3 percent).
The numbers on the federal level tell a similar story. Out of all drug defendants sentenced in federal court for marijuana crimes in 2001, the overwhelming majority were convicted for trafficking, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission. Only 2.3 percent—186 people—received sentences for simple possession, and of the 174 for whom sentencing information is known, just 63 actually served time behind bars.