Terrific series of postings looking at empirics of the drug war and mass incarceration

Over at Medium, Xenocrypt is working on "five-part series on the effects of 'The War On Drugs' on 'mass incarceration'." Two posts into this series makes it clear that serious folks should spend some serious time looking at this analysis. Here are links to the first two lengthy postings:

Why The War On Drugs Matters In Mass Incarceration, Part 1: Who Goes To Prison.

Why The War On Drugs Matters In Mass Incarceration, Part 2: The Two Dimensions Of Prison Populations.

Here is part of the conclusion of this second post:

Why do different offenses seem important when looking at “prison sentences” as when looking at “prison populations”? To try to understand that, visualize “prison populations” as two-dimensional figures. Different parts of the figure might grow in different ways — and looking at height might tell you something different than looking at area.

According to these visualizations, the 2011 state prison system had more prison terms for drugs, “public order/other”, and lower-level violent and property offenses than the 1980 state prison system, but these were mostly short. Some prison terms did grow longer, but on average mostly for murder/non-negligent manslaughter, rape/sexual assault, robbery, and burglary....

Decomposing prison population growth into admissions and time served isn’t just an intellectual or visualization exercise. As I keep saying in this series, focusing on one statistic glosses over real human consequences. Violent offenders serving longer prison terms, along with additional prison terms for “rape/sexual assault” and “other violent” offenses, really did contribute more to “the incarceration rate” per se than the War on Drugs did.

That doesn’t mean the War on Drugs didn’t happen, or that all those extra prison terms for drugs and other lower-level offenses had no effects.  By placing admissions and time served in different dimensions, we might make that distinction clearer, and more fully understand what mass incarceration has really meant.