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52 Harv. J. on Legis. 173 (2015)
The War on Drugs and Prison Growth: Limited Importance, Limited Legislative Options

handle is hein.journals/hjl52 and id is 177 raw text is: SYMPOSIUM: DRUG POLICY REALITY AND REFORM THE WAR ON DRUGS AND PRISON GROWTH: LIMITED IMPORTANCE, LIMITED LEGISLATIVE OPTIONS JOHN F. PFAFF* I. INTRODUCTION The dramatic rise in imprisonment in the United States over the past forty years is hard to understate. Decades of stable incarceration ended sud- denly in the mid-1970s, as the U.S. prison population soared from about 300,000 to 1.6 million inmates, and the incarceration rate from 100 per 100,000 to over 500 per 100,000. The incarceration boom is unprecedented in American history, and unseen anywhere else in the world; traditionally indistinguishable from its peers, the United States is now the world's largest jailer, both in absolute numbers and in rate. Home to only five percent of the world's population, it now houses over twenty percent of its prisoners. Not surprisingly, academics, policymakers, and journalists alike have attempted to ferret out the causes of this carceral explosion. Though explana- tions differ, almost all analysts agree that a major cause has been the War on Drugs. The argument is intuitive and straight-forward: the prison boom has been driven by increases in the arrest, conviction, and incarceration- often for quite long terms-of perhaps often low-level drug offenders as part of federal, state, and local efforts to combat drug use and trafficking.' And Figure 1 suggests why this claim is so easy to accept: U.S. incarceration rates started to set new records around the time the Reagan-era War on Drugs got underway. * Professor of Law, Fordham Law School. 'See, e.g., MICHELLE ALEXANDER, THE NEW JIM CROW: MASS INCARCERATION IN THE AGE OF COLORBLINDNESS (2012).

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