THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF DRUG ENFORCEMENT IN CALIFORNIA

Llad Phillips

Contemporary Economic Policy, 1992, vol. 10, issue 1, 91-100

Abstract: The war on drugs has placed new pressures on the criminal justice system. In recent years, arrests for drug violations have been growing more rapidly than arrests for the FBI index crimes in both the United States as a whole and California. By the year 1988, in California, the ratio of adult felony drug arrests to adult felony arrests for all seven major offenses in the FBI index had grown to 0.65. The analysis in this article concerns the impact that the war on crime and the war on drugs has had on the corrections system in California. Part of this analysis is descriptive. It details the rising proportion of felons newly entering prison after drug law convictions. In addition to swelling the volume of prisoners and changing their composition by offense, the war on drugs has changed the nature of flows between felons on parole and felons in prison. By 1988, for the first time, the number of felons returned to prison for parole violation exceeded the number of felons newly entering prison after court convictions. The analysis develops how the behavior of parole officers and the special significance of drug offenders contribute to this phenomenon. The result has been to circulate more felons between parole and prison, thus reducing discharges as a proportion of total felons on parole and unnecessarily increasing the stock of prisoners.

Date: 1992
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