California's Incarcerated Drug Offender Population, Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow: Evaluating the War on Drugs and Proposition 36

Abstract

Since 1980, the populations of state and federal prisons have more than quadrupled. This has in large part been attributed to increased law enforcement in the wake of the War on Drugs. Data-validated simulation modeling is used to examine the compositional dynamics of the drug offender population incarcerated in California prisons over the period 1980–1998, as well as to prospectively evaluate the impact of the Substance Abuse and Crime Prevention Act of 2000 (the Act), which prohibits incarceration and mandates treatment for first-time nonviolent offenders convicted of simple drug possession. The analyses show that the drug offender population changed in significant ways from 1980 to 1998. The prospective analyses indicate that the Act will have some impacts on the composition of the incarcerated drug offender population that are consistent with the objective of selective incapacitation of dangerous offenders, but will not reduce the proportion of prison space overall devoted to housing drug offenders.