It's not ignored; the paper discusses the "collateral effects" of the WOD, in contrast with the strict definition of a "drug offender". P 220:
In other words, defining “drug offenders” solely as those convicted of
drug crimes is not as objectively correct as it might initially seem. Although
certainly a valid and useful definition, there are other ways to think about
what counts as the product of drug enforcement that may alter estimates of
the impact of the War on Drugs. Furthermore, this section should establish
that scaling back the War on Drugs can have collateral effects
—
such as
changing how society manages addiction or how enforcement interacts with
drug-market violence
—
that are not immediately apparent when simply look-
ing at arrest or incarceration rates.
Thanks for pulling out that quote. To me, this section invalidates the whole paper: I think this paper would have been much more valuable had this been one of the 5 questions/mechanisms examined.
I suspect though that had it been one of the questions it _would_ have shown a bigger link between the war on drugs and incarceration, and thus not been sufficiently interesting to be worthy of publication. Academic click-bait!
Wait, did you read the paper, or did you read the abstract, wait for someone to quote something from the paper, and then use that quote as an argument against the whole paper?
If you have read the paper, can you give a serious coherent series of arguments about how its analysis is broken? Every third page is a simple presentation of statistics and then an analysis of those stats. Which of them are wrong?
I'm sorry to ask the question, since "did you actually read" is borderline uncivil, but when someone quotes something and your reaction is "aha!", the clear suggestion is that you yourself hadn't read far enough to see that quote yourself.
It's fine not to read the paper, but it's less fine to suggest that a tiny quote could invalidate an entire paper that you haven't read.
Of course I didn't read the whole paper! I stopped reading the paper when I recognized the fundamental flaws:
1) the hypotheses examined were very narrowly framed
2) Footnotes 9 and 13 admit that drug-related offenders may in fact be present in the statistics as 'violent crime', yet the paper does not consider this further.
After that I skim-read to ensure there flaws weren't addressed. If I missed the place where these flaws are addressed, I would appreciate your pointing it out.
I am glad you read the whole paper, but I would caution you against believing you got any closer to the whole truth by doing so.
The main problem with the paper is that it keeps discussing from the "War on Drugs" angle, even though it acknowledges early (from its very title onward) that this is not the main contributor to the huge prison population. It's hard to find an answer to the question which immediately follows, "OK, what is the cause, then?" And then it turns out that through indirect effects, in fact WOD might be a primary driver all the same. Confusing.
Can you be more specific about which of the author's conclusions point to drug prohibition being the primary cause of incarceration, just indirectly? That's not the conclusion I got at all.
The conclusion I inferred was that prosecutors are running amok across the whole gamut of possible crimes.
In other words, defining “drug offenders” solely as those convicted of drug crimes is not as objectively correct as it might initially seem. Although certainly a valid and useful definition, there are other ways to think about what counts as the product of drug enforcement that may alter estimates of the impact of the War on Drugs. Furthermore, this section should establish that scaling back the War on Drugs can have collateral effects — such as changing how society manages addiction or how enforcement interacts with drug-market violence — that are not immediately apparent when simply look- ing at arrest or incarceration rates.