The Dutch prison crisis: A shortage of prisoners

Originally Posted by August

If we ended the War on Drugs we might find ourselves in the same situation.

Indeed. I was watching a program the other day here in the UK about smuggling into prisons, and from what was said by prisoners, drugs are probably as easy to get inside as outside. So not only are we jailing vast numbers of people over drugs, but we are entirely failing to remove them from the root cause of the problem. And incidentally adding to a situation which seems to have resulted in corruption amongst significant numbers of prison officers - they seem to be a major conduit for the smuggling not just of drugs, but of mobile phones, weaponry etc. Clearly recreational drugs are always going to be banned from prisons, but reducing the numbers inside for drug-related crime should at least reduce the demand a bit. And free up resources to better tackle some of the other underlying causes of repeat offending.