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Chapter II (continued)
9. The
Link Between Drugs and Crime
While
national crime rates in general continue to decline, almost 1.6
million Americans were arrested for drug-law violations in 1998.98
Many crimes like murder, assault, prostitution, and robbery are
often committed under the influence of drugs and alcohol or may
be motivated by a need to obtain money for drugs. Substance abuse
is frequently a contributing factor in family violence, sexual assaults,
and child abuse.
Arrestees
often test positive for recent drug use — The National
Institute of Justice's (NIJ's) Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring (ADAM)
drug-testing program found that more than two-thirds of adult male
arrestees and half of juvenile male arrestees tested positive for
at least one drug in thirteen of thirty-five sites in 1998. Marijuana
was the drug most frequently detected among both groups.99
The percentages of persons who tested positive for cocaine declined
between 1997 and 1998 in a majority of the twenty-three sites for
which trend data were available although substantial variation existed
between the geographical regions sampled.100
Multiple drug use remains an endemic problem among arrestees, and
more than two-thirds of the individuals who tested positive for
opiates also tested positive for another drug.101
Source: 1999 FBI Uniform Crime Reports
Heroin
use among arrestees remains relatively stable. There has been little
change in the prevalence of opiates among ADAM arrestees or the
population that uses opiates. As has been the case in previous years,
in 1998 female arrestees were more likely to test positive for opiates
than male arrestees. In 1998, male arrestees showed opiate-positive
rates higher than female arrestees by at least four percent in only
four sites: three veteran (Cleveland, New Orleans, and St. Louis)
and one new one (Laredo).102
Marijuana use continues to be a significant problem among young
adult offenders, particularly males. None of the thirty-five ADAM
sites reported less than 20 percent of the adult male samples testing
positive. In Oklahoma City, 87 percent of the fifteen to twenty-year-old
male arrestees tested positive for marijuana.103
Drug-Related
Murders
Source: 1999 FBI Uniform Crime Reports
The
year 1998 offered relatively little change over 1997 for most communities
with respect to methamphetamine use among arrestees. It continued
to appear only sporadically outside western ADAM sites and showed
no sign of geographic expansion.104
Such data are unusual considering the violent behavior sometimes
associated with methamphetamine use. In a survey conducted by the
National Drug Intelligence Center, approximately 35 percent of the
law-enforcement agencies that were queried identified methamphetamine
as their greatest threat.105
Nearly
one in four inmates are drug offenders — State and federal
prison authorities reported that 1,232,900 people were physically
in their custody at the end of the 1998.106
One in every 113 men in the United States was incarcerated in a
state or federal prison at that time.107
More Americans were behind bars than on active duty in the armed
forces. The number of sentenced prisoners rose 4.8 percent in 1998.
Between 1990 and 1998, the number of female inmates serving time
for drug offenses in state prisons was up by 12,000, and drug offenders
accounted for 19 percent of the total growth in the state inmate
population.108
Nearly 60 percent of the inmates in the federal prison system in
1997 were sentenced for drug offenses, up from 53 percent in 1990.109
In 1997, 19,115 people were sentenced in federal court for drug
violations. Almost all (94 percent) these drug offenders were convicted
of drug trafficking. Drug offenders in state and federal prison
have extensive criminal histories. More than half (53 percent) of
state inmates and 24 percent of federal prisoners were on probation
or parole at the time of their current offense. More than eight
in every ten state inmates and six of ten federal inmates had prior
sentences. Nearly half (45 percent) of state inmates and a quarter
of federal inmates had three or more prior sentences. Approximately,
one in every four drug offenders within state prison had been sentenced
previously for violent offenses.
This
high rate of incarceration is spread disproportionately among different
racial/ethnic groups. In 1997 the rate of incarceration for African-American
males was 3,209 per 100,000 compared to 1,273 for Hispanic males
and 386 for white males.110
A March 1997 study by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) found
that black men were nearly twice as likely to be incarcerated (28.5
percent) as Hispanic men (16.0 percent) and six times more likely
than white men (4.4 percent).111
Costs
for incarceration continue to rise. In 1996 state correction expenses
for prisons exceeded $22 billion, an increase of 83 percent from
1990 (in constant dollars).112
State spending per resident for corrections operations have increased
faster than spending on health, education, and natural resources.
State spending for corrections totaled $994 per capita in 1998,
more than twelve times larger than expenditures for education.
State,
Local, and Federal Incarceration Levels
Source: 1999 Bureau of Justice Statistics Bulletin
Substance
abuse, family violence, and child maltreatment — Researchers
have found that one-fourth to one-half of men who commit acts of
domestic violence also have substance-abuse problems. Women who
abuse alcohol or illegal drugs are more likely to become victims
of domestic violence than non-abusing women. Minors in the child
welfare system whose parents have substance-abuse problems are more
likely to have been victims of neglect than other children in similar
situations, and more likely be placed in foster care than remain
at home. Children of substance-abusing parents tend to stay in foster
care for longer periods of time.113
In a January 1999 report, the National Center on Addiction and Substance
Abuse at Columbia University (CASA) estimated that drug abuse causes
or contributes to seven of ten cases of child maltreatment and accounts
for some ten billion dollars in federal, state, and local government
spending on child welfare programs.114
Drugs,
violence, and sexual crimes — The nexus between drugs,
violence, and sexual crimes is abundantly clear. Alcohol is implicated
in more incidents of sexual violence, including rape and child molestation,
than any other drug. Alcohol use — by the victim, perpetrator,
or both — is involved in 46 to 75 percent of date rapes among
college students. Two-thirds of sexual offenders in state prison
were under the influence of alcohol or other drugs at the time of
the crime; 15 percent were under the influence of both alcohol and
other drugs; and 5 percent were under the influence of drugs alone.115
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