US drug arrest rates peaked in 2006 and remain nearly double 1980 levels

Evidence

The national drug arrest rate in 1980, well before the War on Drugs of the mid-1980s commenced, was 256 drug arrests per 100,000 U.S. residents (Snyder, Cooper, & Mulako-Wangota, 2017). This rate grew steadily throughout the 1980s, reversed course somewhat in the early 1990s, then in the mid-1990s started on a 10-year upward trajectory that peaked at 633 drug arrests per 100,000 U.S. residents in 2006, and since then has generally declined. Thus, drug arrests and drug sanctions more generally exhibit at least two strong trends since 1980: a strong upward trajectory from the early 1980s to middle part of the 2000s and a sharp downward trajectory thereafter which continues. Yet, despite the recent decline in the drug arrest rate, the current (2016) rate of approximately 485 per 100,000 is nearly twice that of 1980 (256) (figure 8. — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 1038

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to arguments about the War on Drugs as a policy failure — pairs with Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow framing of the punitive turn.