The reason, according to Michelle Alexander in her bestselling 2010 book, The New Jim Crow, was drugs. “In less than thirty years, the US penal population exploded from around 300,000 to more than 2 million, with drug convictions accounting for the majority of the increase.”4 Between 1980 and 2012, there were an astonishing 43 million drug arrests.5 The “uncomfortable reality,” writes Alexander, “is that arrests and convictions for drug offenses—not violent crime—are the single most important cause of the prison boom in the United States.”6 But a closer look at the data reveals that just 3.7
...more
