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Vito_The_Magnificent t1_jec1tax wrote

Clever to use federal prisons for the offense breakdown.

70,000 people in federal prison for drug crimes looks like it's the driver of incarceration generally.

But there are 158,000 people sitting in state prisons for murder. 163,000 for sexual assault, 132,000 for robbery, 146,000 for assault, 80,000 for burglary.

That doesn't make a graph that makes drugs look like the driver though. Gotta exclude state prisons if you want to present it that way.

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AstralDragon1979 t1_jeci38z wrote

Yup, contextually it’s a very misleading portion of the infographic that perpetuates the myth that prisons are full of low level drug offenders.

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SilentHackerDoc t1_jeebue3 wrote

I'm not trying to be a dick but what evidence do you have for that? The people above broke down total numbers and drug offenses were literally top if not second place. I'd say that's still pretty 'full of drug pffenses' to me. And considering there are hundreds of arrests for drug users for every single arrest for a 'dealer', it's fair to say prisons are at least overly filled with low level drug offenses for what is necessary. People who use drugs do not benefit from jail and they harm no one (given they didn't break any other crimes).

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elsaturation t1_jedenpb wrote

146,000 are in for drug offenses. Not including local jails.

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ReadySte4dySpaghetti t1_jedhdf9 wrote

Yep, here is an infographic showing the breakdown of those incarcerated on drug offenses. Most are in local jails, then state prisons, then federal prisons.

Federal prisons may have the highest proportion, but they have the lowest amount of people total in them for drug uses.

One in 5 people who are incarcerated are incarcerated on drug offenses. While it may not be the 45% percent of federal prisons, it’s still hundreds of thousands of people, and you could still make the argument that drug users are flooding prisons, (as one of the above comments claimed was not the case) depending on what you think flooding means.

This is the most comprehensive thing ever with even more really good graphics.

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Northstar1989 t1_jedngkm wrote

>Clever to use federal prisons for the offense breakdown.

>That doesn't make a graph that makes drugs look like the driver though. Gotta exclude state prisons if you want to present it that way.

Bull.

State prisons, and jails, have huge numbers of drug offenders in them too: which you conveniently leave out of your add-up...

When you add federal, state, and local together; drug charges are still the #1 cause of internment.

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