Colorado's War On Drugs A Fiscal Disaster

My good friend Mike Krause on Huff Post
Huffington Post
Colorado lawmakers' long-running devotion to the War on Drugs has helped push state prison spending to unsustainable levels. In the meantime, illicit drugs remain readily available throughout the state. This year, the Colorado Commission on Criminal and Juvenile Justice (CCJJ) has broken down into several sub-groups including a Drug Policy Task Force, to take a hard look at the state's drug laws and sentencing policies.
This is an excellent opportunity for fiscal conservatives to take the lead in bringing some much needed scrutiny and restraint to corrections spending in Colorado.

In 1992, Colorado lawmakers surrendered their prerogative to write the state's criminal law and enacted the Uniform Controlled Substances Act, written by drug war bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., and designed to bring state drug laws in to conformity with federal drug laws. The act, among many other things, created numerous new drug offenses, and sentencing enhancements for those offenses.

And the result?

Over the last several decades, the percentage of inmates whose most serious sentencing offense is a drug offense has quadrupled to around 20 percent of Colorado's prison population. Drug offenders are by far the single largest category of new admissions to Colorado prisons at around 23 percent of annual admissions.
There are more drug offenders in Colorado prisons today than the entire prison population 25 years ago when the state's inmate population was around 3,500.

Given this, you might think a drug-free Colorado is close at hand. You would be wrong.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mike-krause/colorados-war-on-drugs-a_b_312779.html