We have a problem. More than two million men, women and children are imprisoned in the United States today. This amounts to 686 prisoners for each 100,000 citizens. We have the largest prison population in the world. Our cousins to the north in Canada have 100 and in England there are 135 prisoners for each 100,000 of population. Worldwide, around eight million people are in prison. This means that 25 percent of the world’s prisoners are in the United States, the “land of the free.”

The problem is getting worse in part because we cannot build prisons fast enough to hold the influx of men, women and children. The federal government is building a fifth prison at its complex in Coleman, Florida that will bring that total complex inmate population close to 10,000. The State of Florida had an emergency expenditure in August 2003 of $66 million to expand existing prisons due to an unexpected increase in inmates.

The judiciary has been operating under guidelines that are increasingly severe and rigid. Many recent laws mandate zero tolerance standards, statutory minimum prison terms, and mandatory minimums for time served.

The largest category of offenders in both state and federal prisons are those convicted of drug crimes. Drug-related cases are about 32 percent of the federal case load. In Florida they account for about 28 percent of all sentences. These statistics are deceptive in that they understate the extent of drug involvement, as a single offender may have multiple charges of which drug offenses were not the most severe violation. The most severe violation usually drives the category.

How did we get into this predicament? The genesis of the problem appears to be a schism that appeared in the national fabric at the time of the war in Vietnam and eventually polarized the nation into groups that opposed or supported the war. These groups became known as the “law and order” and “counter-culture.” The end of the war did not end their divergence. The conflict continued in the War on Drugs initiated by the Nixon administration.

Let us clarify the term “drug.” Drugs are divided into two categories, legal and illegal. Alcohol, tobacco, and caffeine are legal drugs, while illegal drugs include marijuana, cocaine, and heroin. The War on Drugs focuses on illegal drugs.

The war on drugs has continued unabated from its initiation in the1970s to today. However, there were two critical junctures. One was the presidential election of 1988 and the other was a great compromise.

The campaign of 1988 marked the political dominance of “law and order” over the counter-culture. It found expression in Willy Horton and the election of George Bush. Michael Dukakis, Bush’s opponent and the governor of Massachusetts, signed a routine weekend furlough for a convict named Willy Horton, a convicted murderer, who raped a woman and savagely beat her boyfriend while out on a prison release program. The incident became the subject of an intense campaign of political advertising. The lesson of that election was not lost on either Democrats or Republicans.