The Morning Journal (Lorain, OH)
Study: Imprisoning drug offenders doesn’t affect drug use
A study from Pew Charitable Trusts states imprisonment for drug offenses does not deter crime.
Pew’s study found “no statistically significant relationship between states’ drug offender imprisonment rates and three measures of drug problems: rates of illicit use, overdose deaths, and arrests.”
The study was presented to New Jersey Governor Chris Christie who is heading up the President’s Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis.
“As the U.S. faces an escalating opioid epidemic, it is important to understand whether and what degree high rates of drug imprisonment affect the nature and the extent of the nation’s drug problems,” Pew wrote in its letter addressed to Christie.
One of the primary reasons for sentencing a person to prison is deterrence, the study states.
“If imprisonment is an effective deterrent to drug use and crime, then all other things being equal, the use of prison for drug offenses should be linked to the societal problems that arise from drugs,” the study states. “The theory of deterrence would suggest, for instance, that states with high rates of imprisonment for drug offenses would experience lower rates of drug use among their residents.”
To test this theory, Pew stated it compared state drug offender imprisonment rates with three important measures of state drug problems: self-reported drug use rates (excluding marijuana), drug
arrest rates, and drug overdose death rates.
Its analysis found “no statistically significant relationship between drug imprisonment and those indicators.”
“In other words, higher rates of drug imprisonment did not translate into lower rates of drug use, lower drug arrests, or lower overdose deaths,” the study stated. “These results hold even with statistical controls applied for standard demographic variables, including the percentage of the population with bachelor’s degrees, the unemployment rate, the percentage of the population that is non-White, and median household income.”
For example, Pew states in the study, Tennessee imprisons drug offenders at
a three-time greater rate than New Jersey, but the illicit drug use in the two states are “virtually the same.”
Indiana and Iowa have nearly identical drug imprisonment rates, but Indiana ranks 27th in illicit drug use rate and 18th in overdose deaths. Iowa ranks 44th in illicit drug use and 47th in overdose deaths.
The study uses 2014 data, the latest year that all data was available.
Ohio ranks 30th in drug imprisonment rate, 32nd in drug arrest rate and 30th in illicit drug use rate. The state has the fifth highest overdose death rate at 23.7 per 100,000 population. Ohio for the first time had more overdose deaths than any other state that year.
The President’s Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis held its first public meeting June 16.
The commission created by an executive order by President Donald Trump and is tasked with outlining a federal strategy to curb the growing opioid epidemic.
An initial report by the commission was originally due June 27 (90 days after its creation), but has been pushed back. Commission member Bertha Madras, a researcher at Harvard Medical School and McLean Hospital told STAT they need more time because it’s a “massive task.” She added they’re going to have “more recommendations than anyone anticipated.”
In the U.S. Attorney General’s Office, Jeff Sessions has pushed for harsher penalties for drug—and other—offenders. In May, the Attorney General instructed federal prosecutors to pursue the most serious charges against the majority of suspects, a reversal of an Obama-era policy.
“The opioid and heroin epidemic is a contributor to the recent surge of violent crime in America,” Sessions said in a May speech in Charleston, West Virginia, the state with the highest drug overdose death rate. “Drug trafficking is an inherently violent business. If you want to collect a drug debt, you can’t, and don’t, file a lawsuit in court. You collect it by the barrel of a gun.”