Daily Archives: May 30, 2017

Theres a Standard Story that many Americans, particularly on the left, believe about mass incarceration: During the 1970s and 80s, the federal government dramatically escalated its war on drugs. This alone led to millions of people getting locked up for fairly low-level drug offenses, causing the US prison population to spike. This new prison population is predominantly black, leading to massive racial disparities in the criminal justice system. And all of this happened, not coincidentally, right after the civil rights movement showing the rise in incarceration was a ploy to oppress black Americans just after they made huge gains.

But in a new book, Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform, Fordham University criminal justice expert John Pfaff offers a trove of evidence that this narrative is by and large wrong or, at the very least, misses much of the real story.

The Standard Story of mass incarceration, as Pfaff calls it, was largely popularized by a 2010 book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander. Pfaff goes through many facts and statistics to show that this Standard Story gets a lot wrong about the causes and realities of mass incarceration, from the types of crime that people are locked up for (in reality, largely violent offenses) to the areas in which reform is truly needed (with a focus on state and local, not federal, reform).

The core failing of the Standard Story is that it consistently puts the spotlight on statistics and events that are shocking but, in the grand scheme of things, not truly important for solving the problems we face, he writes. As a result, it gives too little attention to the more mundane-sounding yet far more influential causes of prison growth.

The story that Pfaff carefully describes is different from the standard narrative: Its not drug offenses that are driving mass incarceration, but violent ones. Its not the federal government thats behind mass incarceration, but a whole host of prison systems down to the local and state level. Its not solely police and lawmakers leading to more incarceration and lengthy prison sentences, but prosecutors who are by and large out of the political spotlight.

The book dampens much of the excitement around the progress weve seen in the past few years. Starting in 2010, the incarceration rate began to fall in the US for the first time in decades. But the drop has been slight, driven mostly by changes to sentencing laws for low-level drug and property crimes.

And based on Pfaffs work, this drop wont continue at least in a dramatic fashion as long as reformers and the public remain focused on a Standard Story thats almost entirely about the federal war on drugs.

Simply stopping the rise in incarceration has been a huge accomplishment, Pfaff notes. If the goal is real decarceration, however, it is time to shift focus to the much broader, much more confounding issues that keep us locked in to our current predicament.

To this end, Pfaff agrees that, for example, we should strive to get low-level drug offenders out of prison. He just says its not enough that the real issue is much bigger.

Its an uncomfortable read, not least because it suggests America will have to make some very tough choices if it wants to seriously cut the incarceration rate: Are we really okay with locking up fewer violent offenders? Does the country really have the ability to sustain a focus on local and state politics to ensure that the real sources of mass incarceration come down? If America does stumble upon a new crime wave or drug crisis, will all the work thats already been done be pulled back as politicians resurrect tough on crime rhetoric (like President Donald Trump has)?

All of this is a reason for reformers to be pessimistic about their ability to undo mass incarceration. The bright spot, if there is one, is that work like Pfaffs can help expose the real problems in the system, leading to more sustainable solutions.

No misconception wraps the Standard Story more than the belief that mass incarceration was caused by the war on drugs. This was widely popularized by Alexanders The New Jim Crow. That book argues that, facing the success of the civil rights movement, racist lawmakers shifted to another regime to try to control black Americans: the criminal justice system. So the federal government launched the war on drugs, locking up black people for low-level drug offenses and driving incarceration rates in the US to astronomical highs.

The impact of the drug war has been astounding. In less than thirty years, the U.S. penal population exploded from around 300,000 to more than 2 million, with drug convictions accounting for the majority of the increase, Alexander writes. She later claims that the uncomfortable reality is that arrests and convictions for drug offenses not violent crime have propelled mass incarceration.

Pfaff demonstrates that this central claim of the Standard Story is wrong. In reality, only about 16 percent of state prisoners are serving time on drug charges and very few of them, perhaps only around 5 or 6 percent of that group, are both low level and nonviolent, he writes. At the same time, more than half of all people in state prisons have been convicted of a violent crime.

By the numbers, Pfaff is correct: The latest data by the US Bureau of Justice Statistics shows that in state prisons, where about 87 percent of US inmates are held, nearly 53 percent are in for violent offenses (such as murder, manslaughter, robbery, assault, and rape), while only about 16 percent, as Pfaff said, are in for drug offenses.

These figures are at best a minimum for the number of violent offenders in prison. Its not rare for violent offenders to plea down their charges to nonviolent crimes; this lets offenders get a lower sentence, and it lets prosecutors and judges skip a costly trial. So at least some of the supposedly nonviolent offenders have likely committed violent crimes.

This context is crucial to understanding why mass incarceration happened: It really was a reaction to a massive violent crime wave. From the 1970s to 90s, violent crime rose dramatically across the US and lawmakers responded, in what Pfaff characterizes as an overreaction, with mass incarceration.

That doesnt rule out the role of racism. One reason that policymakers overreacted to the crime wave, Pfaff acknowledges, is likely prejudice, given that our durable history of racism may make rising crime seem more frightening to white voters than it is to Europeans [who didnt react to their own crime waves with similar bouts of incarceration], or at least it may ensure greater rewards (or fewer risks) for politicians who crack down on poor minority communities.

But the statistics indicate that violent crime played a huge role in mass incarceration. It wasnt just or even mostly the war on drugs. Until we accept that meaningful prison reform means changing how we punish violent crimes, true reform will not be possible, Pfaff writes.

Yet the opposite has happened. Over the past few years, local and state lawmakers have enacted criminal justice reforms. But these efforts almost always focus on low-level drug and property offenses. In some cases, lawmakers and reformers will argue that low-level offenders need to be kept out of prison so more violent offenders can be locked up a framework that could lead to more incarceration, not less. (Consider the common line that we need to focus expensive prison beds on those who deserve them the most.)

Pfaff cites Georgia, often celebrated as a success story in criminal justice reform, as one example: Georgias lauded 2011 reforms have cut prison populations, but hidden in that decline is a rise in the absolute number of people serving time for violent crimes people whose sentences tend to be longer, and whose rising imprisonment may, in the long run, undo the short-run declines.

This wont work, Pfaff argues: Freeing every single person who is in a state prison on a drug charge would only cut state prison populations back to where they were in 1996-1997, well into the mass incarceration period. Thats not to say we shouldnt think about releasing a lot of those who are in prison for these sorts of crimes, but we need to be realistic about what doing so would accomplish more broadly.

A fundamental problem with how the Standard Story approaches mass incarceration is the narrative poses the greater rates of imprisonment as the work of one system, working to perpetuate mass incarceration as a singular response to civil rights gains. As Alexander writes in The New Jim Crow, We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.

The reality is that there are many systems at play more than 3,100, representing every county and county equivalent in America. As Pfaff writes, [T]he term criminal justice system is a misnomer; criminal justice is, at best, a set of systems, and at worst it is a swirling mess of somewhat antagonistic agencies.

Despite the perennial focus on the federal criminal justice system in the media, most incarceration and law enforcement take place at the local level. About 87 percent of all prisoners are held in state systems, Pfaff writes. The federal government runs the single largest prison system, but several states have systems that are fairly close to the federal one in size, and if we look at total populations under some sort of correctional observation (not just prison, but also jail, parole, and probation), the federal government quickly falls out of first place.

The focus on the federal prison system may explain why many in the media and other experts think that drug offenses are such a huge driver of incarceration. In the federal system, about half of prisoners are in for drug crimes more than three times the rate of the state systems.

But given that the state systems contain a much larger bulk of the prison population, Pfaff argues the fight to end mass incarceration should focus at the local and state level and that means focusing on crimes that go far beyond drugs.

Emphasis on local. Take New York, a state that has experienced one of the longest sustained decarcerations in recent history, with prison populations falling by about 25 percent since 1999, Pfaff writes. This looks like a state success story, but the entire decline between 2000 and 2011 took place in just twelve of the states sixty-two counties, with the other fifty counties adding inmates to state prisons during that time.

The federal government does have some sway over local and state prison systems. But Pfaff argues that this influence is perhaps not as strong as people think.

To demonstrate this, he looks at the federal governments main tool for driving criminal justice policies at the local and state levels: grant money. These funds are supposed to encourage local and state government to adopt certain policies, but theyre just not sizable enough to make a big impact.

Between 1993 and 2012, eight major grant-making arms of the US Department of Justice awarded about $38 billion to state and local governments, Pfaff writes. As a percentage of annual criminal justice spending, these grants consistently hovered (in total) around 2 percent for the states and under 1 percent for local governments.

In short, the federal governments war on drugs never played much of a role in incarceration because the federal government just doesnt play much of a role in incarceration overall.

Typically, discussions of the criminal justice system focus on lawmakers, prisons, the police, and maybe judges. Rarely, however, is the most powerful actor in this system mentioned: the prosecutor.

Local and state prosecutors are enormously powerful in the US criminal justice system, in large part because they are given so much discretion to prosecute however they see fit. For example, former Brooklyn District Attorney Kenneth Thompson in 2014 announced that he would no longer enforce low-level marijuana arrests. Think about how this works: Pot is still very much illegal in New York state, but Brooklyns district attorney flat-out said that he would ignore an aspect of the law and its completely within his discretion to do so.

Prosecutors make these types of decisions all the time: Should they bring the type of charge that will trigger a lengthy mandatory minimum sentence? Should they bring a charge thats only a misdemeanor? Should they strike a deal for a lower sentence, but one that can be imposed without a costly trial?

Courts and juries do, in theory, act as checks on prosecutors. But in practice, they dont: More than 90 percent of criminal convictions are resolved through a plea agreement, so by and large prosecutors and defendants not judges and juries have almost all the say in the great majority of cases that result in incarceration or some other punishment.

Many prosecutors are also elected. This, too, is supposed to keep prosecutors in check. But in practice, prosecutors try to appease the electorate by looking tough on crime and that means imposing harsh prison sentences, as well as locking up as many bad guys as possible. (This may go against voters wishes, but another problem is voters dont actually do much to hold prosecutors accountable: When Ronald Wright of Wake Forest University School of Law looked at data from 1996 to 2006, he found that about 95 percent of incumbent prosecutors won reelection, and 85 percent ran unopposed in general elections.)

Pfaff has even found evidence that prosecutors have been the key drivers of mass incarceration in the past couple of decades. Analyzing data from state judiciaries, he compared the number of crimes, arrests, and prosecutions from 1994 to 2008. He found that reported violent and property crime fell, and arrests for almost all crimes also fell. But one thing went up: the number of felony cases filed in court.

Prosecutors were filing more charges even as crime and arrests dropped, throwing more people into the prison system. Prosecutors were driving mass incarceration.

Pfaff provides a real-world example of this kind of dynamic: Take South Dakota, which in 2013 passed a reform bill that aimed to reduce prison populations. The law did lead to prison declines in 2014 and 2015, yet at the same time prosecutors responded by charging more people with generally low-level felonies, and over these two years total felony convictions rose by 25 percent. In the long term, this could lead to even larger prison populations.

To combat this, Pfaff argues that states could enact, for example, prosecutorial guidelines that limit the amount of discretion these officials have.

Almost all stages of the criminal justice system now operate under some sort of guideline or actuarial regime, he writes. The lone exception is the prosecutor. Although prosecutors need room to exercise discretion, their job is not so uniquely different from the other parts of the criminal justice system that they alone cannot do it if they are subjected to some sort of guidance.

Yet, he explains, No major piece of state-level reform legislation has directly challenged prosecutorial power (although some reforms do in fact impede it), and other than a few, generally local exceptions, their power is rarely a topic in the national debate over criminal justice reform.

Piece by piece, Pfaff paints a more nuanced picture of the criminal justice systems in America than that of the Standard Story. In the end, its not that the war on drugs or the federal system doesnt matter; its that they both play a much smaller role than they are typically given credit for. Pfaff goes through similar data on private prisons, the length of certain prison sentences, and other Standard Story tropes showing that they all tend to get outsize attention given their actual impact on incarceration.

It all points to one conclusion: To truly eliminate mass incarceration, reformers will have to at some point shift more attention to dealing with the mass incarceration of violent offenders, not just low-level drug offenders, and do so with a focus on the state and local levels, particularly prosecutors in these areas.

This puts reformers and lawmakers who want to end mass incarceration in a much more difficult situation. For one, its going to be way more challenging to advocate for lower sentences and fewer admissions for violent offenders.

A poll conducted by Morning Consult for Vox last year, for example, found that nearly eight in 10 US voters support reducing prison sentences for people who committed a nonviolent crime and have a low risk of reoffending. But fewer than three in 10 backed shorter prison sentences for people who committed a violent crime and have a low risk of reoffending.

Pfaff tries his hand at some of the messaging that will be needed here: He argues that incarceration is simply an ineffective way to combat crime, while it imposes all sorts of costs on individuals and society that likely outweigh its benefits.

Its true that crime is costly but so, too, is punishment, especially prison, he writes. The real costs are much higher than the $80 billion we spend each year on prisons and jails: they include a host of financial, physical, emotional, and social costs to inmates, their families, and communities. Maybe reducing these costs justifies some rise in crime.

Its hard to imagine Americans buying Pfaffs suggestion that we should accept more crime. But hes certainly right that prison is an ineffective way of dealing with crime, based on much of the research in this area.

A 2015 review of the research by the Brennan Center for Justice estimated that more incarceration and its abilities to incapacitate or deter criminals explained about 0 to 7 percent of the crime drop since the 1990s. Other researchers estimate it drove 10 to 25 percent of the crime drop since the 90s.

More incarceration can lead even to more crime. As the National Institute of Justice concluded in 2016, Research has found evidence that prison can exacerbate, not reduce, recidivism. Prisons themselves may be schools for learning to commit crimes.

Meanwhile, criminal justice experts have come up with all sorts of other solutions to combating crime. There are new police strategies such as hot-spot policing and focused deterrence that have measurable impacts on crime, including violence. There are other ideas focused more on socioeconomic issues, such as stricter alcohol policies, raising the age for dropping out of school, and some behavioral intervention programs.

Besides prison, crime is shaped by the number of police, the unemployment rate, wage levels, the number of crime-aged young men in the population, immigration levels, cultural attitudes toward violence, technological improvements, and so much more, Pfaff writes.

This creates a lot more room to enact policies that are less brutal and much more efficient at dealing with crime than prisons are. Hiring a police officer is probably about as expensive as hiring a prison guard, for example, but investing in police has a much bigger deterrent effect and avoids all the capital expenditures of prisons, Pfaff argues. Steven Levitt has estimated that $1 spent on policing is at least 20 percent more effective than $1 spent on prisons.

In an ideal world, maybe America would spend infinite money on these programs and stop all crime forever. But resources are limited. So the US and the different criminal justice systems within it could see better results if they put the money they do have toward anti-crime policies other than prison.

Adopting this sort of perspective on criminal justice issues, Pfaff argues, is crucial to undoing mass incarceration. The important thing here isnt just to pass laws that cut prison sentences or make it harder to lock someone up, but to fundamentally alter the way that Americans and their leaders think of crime in America. Only then can the US adopt the kind of mentality that will push against tough on crime attitudes even as the crime rate goes up.

After all, even if the US did enact a bunch of reforms now, theres always the fear of a future crime wave, Pfaff explains: If crime starts to really rise again, which almost certainly will happen at some point, theres nothing to prevent legislators from rolling back the current reforms and overreacting once more. He later added, It is a change in attitude, more than anything else, that will prevent legislatures from bringing back tough laws they earlier repealed.

Thats why work like Pfaffs is so important: Only by understanding the real causes of mass incarceration can the public and policymakers be prepared to undo and resist it now and in the future.

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Why you can't blame mass incarceration on the war on drugs - Vox

While Rodrigo Duterte was campaigning to be elected president of the Philippines last year, he said on many occasions that he would arrange, if elected, for people who sold or used drugs to be killed. Extrajudicial killings began even before his inauguration, with victims usually shot and then drugs and guns planted to make it look like the assailants had acted in self-defence. A 77-page application last month by a lawyer, Jude Sabio requesting the international criminal court to commence a preliminary investigation estimated that at least 9,400 people have already been killed by police and vigilantes. According to Sabio, most of the victims were poor young men, but also bystanders, children and political opponents. The killings were briefly halted in January after police killed a South Korean businessman, but have since restarted.

Governments in many countries carry out extrajudicial killings, almost always for military or national security reasons and rarely targeting people who use or sell drugs. An exception is what happened in Thailand in 2003, when Thaksin Shinawatra was prime minister, and an estimated 3,000 people accused of using or selling drugs were murdered without legal process. More than a decade later, under the current rule of a military junta, the legal and military elite is slowly reforming Thailands drug laws. The painful memories of the extrajudicial killings of 2003 are a major factor in the drug law reform now taking place in Thailand.

So far, with the exception of praise from the US president, Donald Trump, there has been strong international condemnation of the extrajudicial killings in the Philippines, including from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. The United Nations human rights council voted 45-1 to urge the Philippines to desist.

Yet while extrajudicial killings have received international attention, the extremism of Dutertes other drug policies measures including the reinstatement of the death penalty for drug offences, the lowering of the age of criminal responsibility to as low as 10, and mandatory drug testing in schools and workplaces have been largely ignored.

The unpalatable fact for policymakers everywhere is that extrajudicial killings of people who use drugs would never occur without the sanction of a global drug prohibition, a system that started with an international meeting convened by the US in Shanghai in 1909. A series of such meetings culminated in three international drug treaties (in 1961, 1971 and 1988) approved by almost every nation. The US president Richard Nixon intensified what he called the war on drugs in 1971 to help him win re-election in 1972 despite the deeply unpopular Vietnam war.

Global drug prohibition was expected to reduce the international drug market and make it less dangerous. But this is the opposite of what happened. Instead, production and consumption of drugs such as heroin and cocaine increased and their price fell by 80% over a quarter of a century. More than 100 new psychoactive drugs are identified within the EU every year, some of them much more dangerous than older drugs.

Drug prohibition was also supposed to protect the health and wellbeing of communities. But drug-related deaths, disease, violence and corruption have in many places increased rather than decreased. In Australia, where I spent three decades providing alcohol and drug treatment and advocating public health and human rights , while based in a Sydney teaching hospital, the rate of heroin overdose deaths allowing for the growth in the population over time increased 55-fold between 1964 and 1997.

In most western countries, property crime taking money or property without threat has skyrocketed from the 1960s to the present day. Drug prohibition is not the only factor, but its certainly a major one. The number of homicides has also increased in many countries, and this too is linked to the prohibition of drugs and the market this creates for organised crime.

But the effects on producer countries and trafficking countries such as Mexico are far worse than anything experienced in rich countries. When Felipe Caldern became president of Mexico in 2006 he declared a war on drugs. By the time he left office six years later, drug traffickers, the army or police had killed at least 80,000 Mexicans. In some countries drug prohibition has encouraged rampant corruption in policing, courts and up to the highest levels of government. Major drug producing or transit countries such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Myanmar, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia and Mexico have risked becoming unstable failed states, even posing threats to the national security of some other countries.

Global drug prohibition has turned out to be an expensive way of making a bad problem much worse

It isnt that the world has not implemented its war on drugs the right way. A war on drugs will always fail. When correctional authorities cant keep drugs out of prisons, how can we expect drugs to be kept out of our cities and suburbs? When 1kg of heroin or cocaine multiplies in price several hundred-fold from its country of origin to its city of destination, how can we stop it from being transported? When drug traffickers are better resourced than police, how can we expect our authorities to stop drugs being trafficked?

In the past few years, former world leaders and even some in office have started calling for drug law reform. The essential elements are clear. First, redefine drugs as primarily a health and social issue. Second, improve treatment. Third, start reducing and, where possible, eliminating sanctions for drug use and drug possession. Fourth, regulate as much of the drug market as possible, starting with recreational cannabis. And fifth, shrink extreme poverty, which exacerbates drug problems.

Countries implementing at least some of these measures have seen a decrease in deaths, disease, crime and violence. In Switzerland, illicit drug seizures fell in the 1990s, suggesting that the drug black market may have contracted. And like Switzerland, the Netherlands in the 1970s and Portugal in 2001 benefited from redefining drugs as primarily a health issue. Now some countries are starting to try to regulate parts of their drug market. Eight states in the US, A encompassing 20% of the population, have approved the taxation and regulation of recreational cannabis. Uruguay was the first nation to regulate recreational cannabis. And in July 2018 Canada should become the first G7 nation to do so. Clearly, global drug prohibition is starting to unravel.

But there is a significant risk that Dutertes campaign of extrajudicial killings and the lack of any serious international response may encourage other countries to instead follow his example. Duterte, who declared martial law in parts of the Philippines last week following gun battles between security forces and Islamic State militants, was recently quoted as saying: Hitler massacred 3 million Jews. Now, there is [sic] 3 million drug addicts. Id be happy to slaughter them. Hitler noted the lack of an international response to the Ottoman governments genocide of 1.5 million Armenians between 1915 and 1917 and that emboldened him to proceed to his own Holocaust of six million Jews, Gypsies and homosexuals. It would be ironic as well as tragic if the extrajudicial killings of people who use drugs started to spread just when the international drug control system has started collapsing.

It should not take extrajudicial killings in the Philippines in 2017 to make the world realise that global drug prohibition has turned out to be an expensive way of making a bad problem much worse. When Mikhail Gorbachev realised in the 1980s that communism in the USSR had failed, he called for glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring). We now need more openness about drug policy, along with a major restructuring of our response to drugs. The only winners so far have been drug traffickers and the many politicians who found that bad policy made good politics. The longer change is delayed, the more difficult the transition will be.

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We have waged war on drugs for a century. So who won? - The Guardian

After descending that Trump Tower escalator in July 2015, Trump made headlines when he kicked off his campaign by proclaiming that Mexico was sending us "rapists." Less noted has been that he began his list of woes coming from the South by castigating Mexican immigrants for "bringing drugs." Already in that speech the solution he offered to this caricatured problem was "the wall." Almost two years later, the wall is still meant to solve the problem of drugs, as in this tweet from April: "If the wall is not built, which it will be, the drug situation will NEVER be fixed the way it should be!"

Trump's well-received joint address to Congress in February also explained his desire to limit immigration by focusing on drugs: "We've defended the borders of other nations while leaving our own borders wide open for anyone to cross and for drugs to pour in at a now unprecedented rate."

No surprise, then, that Sessions has been working steadily, since his confirmation, to restore the building blocks of the War on Drugs that political leaders from both parties have been quietly removing for the past five years. He has ordered a review of federal policies on state legalization of marijuana and appears to be seeking an end to the policy of federal non-interference with the cascade of legalization efforts. He has ordered a review of consent decrees, whose purpose is to spur police reform, and sought to delay the implementation of Baltimore's. He has recently handed down guidance requiring federal prosecutors to seek the stiffest possible sentences available for drug offenses.

To support these efforts, Trump has proposed hiring 10,000 immigration officers and 5,000 Border Patrol agents and beefing up support for police departments. According to the White House website, "The Trump Administration will be a law and order administration" for a country that "needs more law enforcement."

The Obama administration had begun to drive toward replacing criminal-justice strategies for drug control with public-health strategies. It wasn't whistling in the dark but following, at least in part, the innovative model of drug control pioneered by Portugal. Use and modest possession of marijuana and other drugs have been decriminalized, but large-scale trafficking is still criminal. The criminal-justice system focuses on those large-scale traffickers, while public-health strategies and harm-reduction techniques pinpoint users and low-level participants in the drug economy. Adolescent drug use is down, the percentage of users seeking treatment is up, and Portugal is interdicting increased quantities of illegal narcotics.

Countries across Central and South America would like to follow Portugal and transition from a criminal-justice paradigm to an individual and public-health paradigm for drug control. They have advocated for this change at the United Nations but have been blocked by Putin's Russia. Indeed, Putin is one of the world's most steadfast advocates for the 1980s War on Drugs concept.

Of course, Trump has expressed a strange affinity for Putin and also for Duterte, the president of the Philippines. Duterte has called for the "slaughter" of the Philippines' estimated 3 million addicts. The death toll from extrajudicial killings that he seems to have sparked has already reached into the thousands. The response from the United States? Trump praised Duterte for doing an "unbelievable job on the drug problem" and invited him to the White House.

Yet Trump's initial budget plan involved proposing nearly complete defunding of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, which was founded by congressional legislation in 1988. How does that square?

The Obama administration deployed that office to "restore balance" to U.S. drug-control efforts, increasing emphasis on treatment, prevention and diversion programs, and fostering a move toward a health-based strategy. The expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act and requirements that insurers support mental-health and addiction treatment undergirded this effort, supporting the emergence of programs designed to divert low-level drug offenders out of the criminal-justice system and into treatment. This has made for the very promising beginnings of a health-based approach to drug control.

The Trump administration has painted a bull's eye on this new policy strategy and is firing away. While the White House has backed off defunding the Office of National Drug Control Policy, it continues to pursue the reversal of the Medicaid expansion. The administration appears to think narcotics control can be achieved entirely through the tools of criminal justice.

But we tried that in the 1980s, the decade of "Miami Vice," the era when the Los Angeles police chief, Daryl Gates, could testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee that casual drug users "ought to be taken out and shot." We know where that story ends: with increased incarceration, further degradation of urban neighborhoods, no durable change in rates of drug use and a failure to address addiction.

So, yes, Trump has a vision, and he's moving steadily toward it, wrongheaded though it is, dragging us along with him, as if into a wall.

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Allen is a political theorist at Harvard University and a contributing columnist for The Washington Post.

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Washington Post Op-ed: The war on drugs explains the Trump ... - Salt Lake Tribune