In Colorado, drug-related charges are only down 23% post legalization. Of course, marijuana charges rarely resulted in jail time to begin with, so the impact on prison population is a lot less than that.
Even releasing every drug prisoner would only have a modest effect on incarceration rates: http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/releasing-drug-offenders-.... It would drop the prison population by about 15%, but we would still have ten times the incarceration rate of Denmark.
Drug legalization is something we need to do, for sure. But it's frustrating to see the conversation regarding prison reform always get co-opted by legalization advocates. Denmark has less than 1/10th the incarceration rate of the U.S. If we were listing the top 5 reasons for that disparity, drugs probably wouldn't even make the cut (especially considering drugs--including marijuana--are illegal in Denmark!)
In Colorado, drug-related charges are only down 23% post legalization. Of course, marijuana charges rarely resulted in jail time to begin with, so the impact on prison population is a lot less than that.
Even releasing every drug prisoner would only have a modest effect on incarceration rates: http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/releasing-drug-offenders-.... It would drop the prison population by about 15%, but we would still have ten times the incarceration rate of Denmark.