Quotes About Nonviolent drug offenses

William Julius Wilson makes this point in his book, When Work Disappears. In his view, it is massive unemployment and not the lack of family values that has devastated our inner-cities and placed one-third of our young men-denied even menial jobs when they lacked education and skills-in prison or in the jaws of the criminal court system, most of them for nonviolent drug offenses.2

But a closer look at the data reveals that just 3.7 percent of state prisoners are there for nonviolent drug possession, and that 14.1 percent of state prisoners are locked up for any nonviolent drug offense. Forty-seven percent of inmates in federal prisons are in for nonviolent drug convictions, but there are just 172,000 people in federal prisons and 1.3 million in state prisons.7 Over half of all prisoners in state prisons are there for violent offenses like murder, rape, and robbery.8