from work should not interfere with their employment.Many people, including the former drug czar Barry McCaffrey, believe that the U.S. cannot “arrest our way out of the [drug] problem.” The U.S. prison population has quadrupled since early 1980’s. It is now around 1.8 million and steadily rising. More than half of the prisoners are nonviolent offenders. Not all federal drug cases consist of large-scale seizures. The Department of Justice figures show that 36 percent of federal drug-law offenders are small time, nonviolent dealers. Legalization would get rid of these people in jail and take some of the burden off of the justice system. The only thing that arresting people for possession does is slow down the already sluggish court system. The punishment for possession of marijuana has become more harmful than the drug itself. Early in the fight against drugs the punishments were as harsh as life in prison to even the death sentence. If the penalties were as stiff now as they were then, taxpayers would be paying many billions of dollars a year to execute petty criminals. Possession is now punishable by fines up to some jail time. Some states are looking at alternatives to incarceration to save the state money and rehabilitate the convicted. Arizona was the first state to offer treatment instead of jail time to all of its nonviolent drug offenders. The results showed that 70 percent of those on probation tested negative. In New York first-time offenders arrested for possession rarely ended up in jail. Repeat offenders were offered a drug-treatment alternative to prison. A state of California study showed that every dollar spent on treatment saved seven dollars in reduced hospital admissions and law-enforcement costs. This shows that incarceration is not the way to go when dealing with drug dealers. A 1997 Rand Corporation study found that treatment reduces about ten times more serious crime than conventi...
