If the war on drugs has proven to be a failure, why are most governments focused on incarceration instead of rehabilitation?
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Because a lot of people vote/fund things that make sense to them morally or intellectually, regardless of whether or not they’re actually effective. They think “drugs = bad, criminals = bad, drug criminals -> prison. Duh.”
If you point out that rehabilitation and restorative justice would work better and be more humane, to those people, not only are you “soft” on crime, but you care about criminals more than good people like them.
Because people still get elected by being “tough” on drugs.
Drug addiction is a complex problem, but voters want simple solutions, lock ’em all up is about as simple as it gets. Also, people who are against recreational drug us are *really, really* against it and will vote against anyone they don’t think agrees. People who are more tolerant usually aren’t as passionate about it and aren’t going to care as much about a candidates views on the matter. So the “safe” (i.e., morally cowardly) approach is to pander to those to are strongly against drugs while trying to win over everyone else on other issues.
Finally, drug use is kind of like speeding. It is a violation lots of people commit that police usually ignore, but like to have in their back pocket in case they need leverage.
Because rehabilitation approaches don’t work. That’s not to say it wouldn’t be between, clearly rehabilitation would produce more value than incarceration. It’s just that we know how to effectively incarcerate people and we don’t know how to effectively rehabilitate people. It turns out that most internal thought process manipulation isn’t very effective.
The “war on drugs” has not failed – in fact, it has been a massive success! See, the thing is that it was not intended to reduce drug use or sales, so you can’t judge it based on those measures. It was intended to punish hippies and African Americans, and that’s exactly what it has done.
Sounds like some crazy conspiracy theory, right? Don’t worry, you don’t have to believe Some Random Dude On The Internet. We’ll let Nixon’s adviser John Ehrlichman explain – in his own words, quoted directly, on the record:
>”The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
After that, Reagan created rules to massively increase civil asset forfeiture in drug-related cases, and increased the FBI’s drug enforcement budget by literally 1,180%. Why such a massive increase? Because “civil asset forfeiture” means that if someone is accused of dealing drugs, the authorities are allowed to seize any property or cash that they think is connected to the drugs. The person doesn’t have to be *convicted* of dealing drugs, either, just *accused*, so spending more money on enforcement means that you can seize a lot more assets and make a massive profit – a report from 2014 said that the Justice Department had taken in *five billion dollars* that year from civil asset forfeitures, for example.
Now, consider the for-profit prison system, where privately-owned prisons are specifically set up to make money off of having as many people as possible people in jail. And, hey, look, the war on drugs was already set up to throw huge amounts of people in jail, and it even specifically targeted people who were more likely to be poor and therefore less able to fight against the legal system! It’s a great match for a corporation that needs lots of people in lots of jail cells so that it can make the largest possible profit.
I am unsure if there is an ELI5 for this that isn’t based on some conspiracy theory.
People like to feel inebriated in one way or another. People who lack control on how to use drugs or those who help create that market by selling them know what that what they are doing is wrong. As a result they must be removed.
Nobody is focused on incarceration alone. You could ask a similar question…if a person knows the repercussions why do they continue to do dumb things?
Because for fifty years the conversation has gone “drugs = bad” and few politicians have been bothered to try to change that, unless they’ve really had to (i.e. Portugal).
Appearing to be tough on crime is a usually a safe vote winning strategy and it’s much easier to continue saying “drugs = bad” than explaining to people – particularly a disengaged voter base – why it’s cheaper and better for society in the long run to rehabilitate people.
And many people, even having heard the arguments for decriminalisation and rehabilitation still say have a deeply held moral panic about drugs. Over the course of last summer in Australia half a dozen people died having taken dodgy ecstasy at festivals. There were calls for pill testing which the government avoided – and it wasn’t uncommon for people to say, of the people that died, “good, thats what you get for taking drugs”. Try selling rehabilitation to a voter base that thinks people deserve to die because they take drugs.
Also, particularly in the USA but elsewhere as well: the prison industrial complex.
Not most. Lets pick on the US: the reason why prisons in the US in particular are so focused on incarceration instead of rehabilitation is because prisons are a for-profit industry. Few state or federal prisons are run directly by the various departments of corrections, the majority of them are run by contract prison companies. These in turn seek to maximize profits by cutting costs, cramming prisoners into otherwise deplorable conditions (look at any jail cell in say Sweden or Denmark vs. a US prison) and seeking to keep as many people incarcerated as possible. Not only that, they have a huge lobby group who wine and dine congressmen and senators to ensure legislation that continues to prosecute and keep incarcerated as many people as they can.
1. Not everyone is convinced the war on drugs has “proven to be a failure.”
2. Many people interpret “tough on crime” to mean “tough on criminals.” That the most appropriate way to deal with crime is to have harsh sentences. Creating criminals in a humane way by trying to “fix” them is seen as being weak on crime.
3. People profit from high incarceration rates and use that money to influence government officials to keep those policies in place.
>If the war on drugs has proven to be a failure
There is your problem. Logical fallacy – complex question, or possibly begging the question. There is no objective proof that the war on drugs is a failure, because there are no defined check-points (i.e. what is success and what is failure).
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