In an article titled
"Turning the tide on Drug reform"written by Kristen Gwynne and published in the Feb 18, 2013 issue of "The Nation" it says that according to the FBI, 750,000 people were arrested for marijuana related crimes in 2011. The article said that was about one half of all the drug war arrests in 2011, which was a total of 1.5 million. I checked out an FBI web page titled: Crime in the United States 2011And that said in the United States there were a total of 12.4 million arrests in 2011. That means arrests for victimless drug war crimes accounted for about 12 percent of all the arrests in the United Stated in 2011. And that arrests for victimless marijuana crimes accounted for about 6 percent of all the arrests in 2011. I suspect these numbers are misleading because the FBI considers each charge a person was arrested for as a separate arrest. So if a person was arrested and charged with 3 crimes that would account for 3 separate arrests, not one. I frequently say that two thirds of the people in Federal prisons are there for victimless drug war crimes, so the 12 percent number here is about one sixth of the figure I usually give. I don't know why the numbers are different. Perhaps because the 12 percent number is number of arrests. While the two thirds number or 66 percent is the number of people in prisons, and each person arrested is not sent to prison. |