Did you actually read the paper? It's hard to imagine how anyone who did could come away with the conclusion that it's white-washing mass incarceration.
Could you be more specific about this claim so I can be sure that we're talking about the same paper? Because in the paper I'm reading, the author returns again and again to the need for radical legislative solutions to the problem of mass incarceration, and specifically to the need for oversight over prosecutors, who are charging more people even as the crime rate falls.
The paper is also at pains to point out that ending the drug war could have other benefits besides decreasing prison populations.
Basically, the guy is stating that because the offenses people are being put into prison for are not drug-related offenses, it's not because of the war on drugs. Which is equivalent to saying that a football player doesn't have long-term memory loss because he played football, it's because he hurt his head multiple times.
People aren't put into prison because people are put into prison, but that's close to the truth. If people had jobs and an education, they wouldn't need prison gangs and the drug trade to provide them an income. But an entire underclass of people in this country depend on the illegal drug trade to survive. It's the war on drugs that has made this possible. And he's shifting the focus/blame away from that.
At the very least, this is post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc logic: it could be that people commit violent crimes because they're involved in the drug trade, or it could be that people who would ordinarily live a life of violent crime are disinclined to honor drug prohibition, alone among all the other laws they ignore.
