This is an excelent article from the ChicagoTribune

                               Copyright 2000 Chicago Tribune Company
                                          Chicago Tribune
                     February 7, 2000 Monday, CHICAGO SPORTS FINAL
EDITION
SECTION: COMMENTARY; Pg. 11; ZONE: N
LENGTH: 853 words
HEADLINE: A RECORD POLITICIANS AREN'T TALKING ABOUT
BYLINE: Salim Muwakkil.
BODY:
This month the nation will mark two paradoxical milestones. The economic
expansion has becomes the longest in history
and the prison population will reach 2 million.

Because economic vitality tends to dampen criminal behavior, those
disparate benchmarks seem to confound conventional
wisdom. Why are the jails filling up while the economy is roaring along?
The answer is four words: the war on drugs.

According to a recent report by the Justice Policy Institute, the U.S.
prison and jail population will top 2 million for
the first time by Feb. 15. With that astounding total, this country has
amassed the largest prison population, as well as the
highest incarceration rate, on Earth. With just 5 percent of the world's
population, the U.S. has a quarter of the world's
prisoners.

The report noted that the decade of the 1990s witnessed the largest
spurt of imprisonment in U.S. history. The rate of
prison growth during that decade was nearly 30 times the average rate of
increase for any decade prior to the 1970s, and
drug offenses accounted for a significant amount of that increase.

While we hear plenty of chest-thumping rhetoric about the record
economic expansion, our dubious distinction as the
world's leading jailer is seldom a topic of public discussion. This
nation's enormous incarceration rate is a social
catastrophe that should be a major focus of our political discourse. But
it is a stealth issue, even in a national political
campaign. All the presidential candidates--Democrats as well as
Republicans--have been fairly silent on the issue, except
to strenuously downplay their own past drug use.

On the federal level, U.S. leadership has opted for the ostrich
approach. The Republicans are afraid to differ from the
military mind-set made famous by the sainted Ronald Reagan, who
officially launched the drug war in 1982. That war
brought increased funding for drug law enforcement and prompted a surge
of inmates and drug offenders that continues
to accelerate. When Reagan took office, the prison population was about
500,000. It has quadrupled since then and a high
percentage of that increase is drug-related.

Democrats, who purport to favor a less punitive approach, have done
little to bring relief to the incredible incarceration
epidemic plaguing the nation. In fact, it was President Clinton who
oversaw the record increases in prison inmates during
the 1990s. What's more, the latest FBI data revealed that the number of
marijuana arrests also hit a record high during the
tenure of the president who didn't inhale. Most drug arrests are for
marijuana possession.

Rather than burst the bubble of pretense that surrounds the idiotic drug
war, national politicians prefer to push their heads
even further into the sand. But discontent about this war's casualties
is growing at state and local levels. Not only have
voters in seven states and Washington, D.C., passed initiatives
supporting the medical use of marijuana, efforts also are
under way in many cities and some states to provide drug treatment as
alternatives to prison.

Surprisingly, the politicians who have most publicly defied drug war
propaganda have been Republicans. U.S. Rep.
Thomas Campbell, the California Republican who is the likely nominee in
this year's Senate race, has urged reform of
Draconian drug laws that have fueled record spending for corrections
while inhibiting funding for education in his state.
California is not alone. The Justice Policy Institute study notes that
in the last two decades, state spending on
corrections across the country increased by nearly 100 percent, while
spending on higher education decreased by 6
percent.

Gary Johnson, the GOP governor of New Mexico, also has made some strong
statements condemning the drug war. He
argues that the costly campaign against drugs has left courts and
prisons overwhelmed with people arrested for
possessing only small amounts of illegal substances. "We are spending
incredible amounts of our resources on
incarceration, law enforcement and courts," he told The New York Times.
"As an extension of everything I've done in
office, I made a cost-benefit analysis, and this one really stinks."
Johnson also suggests that government decriminalize,
even legalize, drugs.

There's little chance that the present group of presidential aspirants
will offer such logical approaches. Rather, we're
likely to hear round after round of simplistic rhetoric as each
candidate labors to cast himself as a patriotic drug warrior.

Controversy about George W. Bush's reported drug use has come and gone
with his evasive "no comment" and the other
dwindling number of candidates either have declared themselves drug
virgins or victims of youthful exuberance.

The latest blow-up concerns reports that Vice President Al Gore was a
regular rather than occasional pot-puffer.
Candidate Gore certainly claims credit for his part in the record
expansion that has made the U.S. an international beacon
of economic success.

Shouldn't he also take some credit for a prison population that is the
shame of the world?