Something's in the Air

Race, Crime, and the Legalization of Marijuana

Katherine Tate, James Lance Taylor, Mark Q. Sawyer, Katherine Tate, James Lance Taylor, Mark Q. Sawyer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415842396
• eBook ISBN: 9781135017057
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

America's drug laws have always exerted an unequal and unfair toll on Blacks and Latinos, who are arrested more often than Whites for the possession of illegal drugs and given harsher sentences. In this volume, contributors ask how would marijuana legalization affect communities of color? Is legalization of marijuana necessary to safeguard minority families from a lifetime of hardship and inequality? Who in minority communities favors legalization and why, and do these minority opinions differ from the opinions held by White Americans? This volume also includes analyses of the policy debate by a range of scholars addressing economic, health, and empowerment issues. Comparative lessons from other countries are also analyzed.

1

Criminal Justice Costs of Prohibiting Marijuana in California

Jonathan P. Caulkins and Beau Kilmer¹

A common argument for legalizing marijuana is that it would save the criminal justice system time and resources. Indeed, estimates of the cost of enforcing California’s marijuana laws featured prominently in the debate about Proposition 19. Some advocates cited research claiming that legalization would save California $1 billion in criminal justice expenditures.² This chapter finds that such estimates are too high by at least a factor of five. Also, although these figures are sometimes presented as a potential savings to taxpayers, it may be more realistic to think in terms of allowing these resources to be redirected toward other types of crime.

Estimating marijuana-enforcement costs is not easy, especially for California. For example, most arrests are for misdemeanors, not felonies, and the literature contains little information describing how burdensome misdemeanor arrests are for police or courts. And, even before California SB 1449 went into effect in January 2011, possession of less than one ounce already was usually treated as a special type of “citable” misdemeanor that typically only led to the equivalent of a traffic ticket. Such nuances help explain why existing estimates differ by a factor of 10.

This chapter assesses previous efforts and generates improved estimates. Since most legalization proposals keep marijuana illegal for those under 21 (a group that accounts for roughly 45 percent of all marijuana arrests in California), we only estimate costs associated with prohibiting marijuana for those 21 and older.

Existing Estimates of the Cost Marijuana Prohibition Imposes on California

This section summarizes past studies’ estimates. The figures presented are those in the original publications; they have not been adjusted for inflation.

Miron (2005): $981 Million. Miron’s (2005) approach involves prorating historical costs. For example, if the total expenditures on an activity (such as making arrests) is $100 million per year and 10 percent of those actions involve marijuana offenders, then the estimate of that component of enforcing marijuana prohibition is $10 million per year.

Miron concludes that the United States spends $7.7 billion per year enforcing laws against marijuana production, distribution, and possession, including $5.3 billion by state and local governments and $2.4 billion at the federal level. Miron’s paper included state-specific figures; for California, the estimate was $981 million (in 2003 dollars).

Miron (2005) breaks down the criminal justice process into three components: police, judicial, and corrections. Policing expenditures on marijuana enforcement are estimated as the total budget for policing services multiplied by the proportion of arrests for marijuana offenses, after making an adjustment for the possibility that some marijuana arrests are incidental to other enforcement action.

The particular numbers for California in Miron (2005) are $8.7 billion spent on police services × (0.9 percent of arrests being for marijuana sales/manufacture + 0.5 × 1.8 percent of arrests being for marijuana possession) = $228 million.

These calculations have limitations, of which we mention two. First, not all arrests are equally burdensome on police. Investigating a homicide typically involves greater time and effort than does making a marijuana arrest, which may in turn be more work than making some other arrests (e.g., for loitering). By prorating the entire police budget in proportion to arrests, Miron is assuming that all arrests are equally burdensome, including, implicitly, that equal amounts of investigative effort precede all arrests.

Another more important limitation of Miron’s approach is that police do much more than just arrest people. They also do traffic enforcement, emergency response, crime prevention other than via deterrence (e.g., via community policing and education interventions), and a host of other functions. It is very hard to prorate police budgets across these functions. The problem is analogous to figuring out how much of a Coast Guard cutter’s cost to attribute to drug interdiction as opposed to interdicting other goods, enforcing fishing regulations, and performing other Coast Guard roles (Murphy 1994). However, it is not even safe to assume that the majority of a police department’s budget should be prorated across arresting activities.

For judicial costs, Miron (2005) multiplies the total judicial budget ($6.255 billion for California) by an assumed national fraction of felony convictions for marijuana in state courts (10.9 percent).³ This raises three concerns. First, just as police do more than arrest, courts likewise do more than adjudicate criminal cases. Second, not all felony convictions consume the same amount of judicial resources; nationally, the proportion of drug convictions obtained by guilty pleas (which are cheaper than trials) is somewhat higher than it is for other offenses, particularly violent offense (Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics, Table 5.46). Third, the national 10.9 percent figure may be too high for California. Marijuana offenses accounted for only 3.7 percent of felonies where the prosecutors sought a complaint in 2009 (14,105/381,390; California Attorney General [CA AG] 2010). These concerns are important because judicial costs account for 70 percent of Miron’s (2005) estimate of the total cost of marijuana enforcement in California ($682 out of $981 million).

Finally, Miron estimates corrections costs as the California corrections budget ($7.17 billion) multiplied by 1 percent, where 1 percent is the weighted average of the proportion of prisoners incarcerated on marijuana charges in five states. California is one of those five states, and its proportion (0.8 percent) is lower than the weighted average (Miron 2005). This alone would make 1 percent of $7.17 billion an overestimate by 25 percent.

Gieringer (2009): $204 Million. Gieringer (2009) takes a bottom-up approach that uses unit costing of all the units of an activity involved in marijuana enforcement. This approach is not as different as it sounds because estimates of the cost per unit often come from dividing total budgets by total activity levels, in which case, the two approaches reduce to the same thing. However, in the case of policing, where resources serve multiple purposes simultaneously, the differences can be significant.

Gieringer’s approach is (primarily) a straightforward summing of numbers of marijuana-related enforcement activities times the unit cost of each activity, for the following activities: misdemeanor arrests, misdemeanor court cases, felony arrests, felony prosecutions, and offenders in state prison. The exceptions are jail (estimated simply as 40 percent of the prison cost) and the California Marijuana Suppression Program, which is listed as $3.8 million, perhaps based on a budget line item. Also, Gieringer assumes that fines are sufficient to offset the cost of misdemeanor arrests (which he would otherwise have counted as $300 per arrest).

The striking difference between Gieringer’s and Miron’s estimates is Giering-er’s much lower average cost per arrest. Gieringer’s figures are 17,000 felony arrests at $732 per arrest. There were roughly 61,000 misdemeanor arrests. If we cost them at $300 per arrest, that implies an average cost per arrest of $395 [(17,000 × $732 + 61,000 × $300)/(17,00+61,000)]. In contrast, dividing Miron’s (2005) estimated policing cost of $280 million (the inflation adjustment of $228 million, which was in 2000 dollars) by 78,000 arrests would imply an average cost per arrest of $3,600, or about nine times as much per arrest.

Gieringer’s estimate of average cost per arrest rests on an inflation update of a study that dates to 1977; however, Gieringer’s source is marijuana specific. We found nothing more recent that was marijuana specific. But much has changed since 1977 besides inflation, so in our judgment, basing arrest costs on more recent studies is better, even if they were not marijuana specific.

Miron (2010): $1.87 Billion. A recent update (Miron 2010) increased the national estimate from $7.7 billion to $13.7 billion and the California-specific estimate to $1.87 billion. This update imputes a much higher cost of marijuana-related incarceration because he prorates all drug-related incarceration across drugs in proportion to the fraction of sales/manufacturing arrests by drug. However, marijuana offenders are less likely to be prosecuted and they receive shorter sentences if they are prosecuted, so this approach assigns far too much of the drug-related incarceration costs to marijuana.

California Legislative Analyst’s Office. The California Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) assessed the impact that Proposition 19’s passage would have on taxpayers and, concerning corrections costs, stated (California Legislative Analyst’s Office [CA LAO] 2010):

The measure could result in savings to the state and local governments by reducing the number of marijuana offenders incarcerated in state prisons and county jails, as well as the number placed under county probation or state parole supervision. These savings could reach several tens of millions of dollars annually. The county jail savings would be offset to the extent that jail beds no longer needed for marijuana offenders were used for other criminals who are now being released early because of a lack of jail space.

With respect to court and law enforcement costs, the LAO noted:

The measure would result in a reduction in state and local costs for enforcement of marijuana-related offenses and the handling of related criminal cases in the court syst...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Editors’ Introduction: Ending a War or Just California Dreamin’?
• 1. Criminal Justice Costs of Prohibiting Marijuana in California
• 2. Public-Health Considerations in the Legalization Debate
• 3. The Paths Not (Yet) Taken: Lower Risk Alternatives to Full-Market Legalization of Cannabis
• 4. Why Did Proposition 19 Fail?
• 5. Winds of Change: Black Opinion on Legalizing Marijuana
• 6. The Highs and Lows of Support for Marijuana Legalization Among White Americans
• 7. Building Minority Community Power Through Legalization
• 8. The Latino Politics of Proposition 19: Criminal Justice and Immigration
• 9. No Half-Measures: Mexico’s Quixotic Policy on California’s Proposition 19
• 10. The “Chronic” and Coercion: Exploring How Legalizing Marijuana Might Get the U.S. Government off the Backs and Throats of Americans (or, Not)
• References
• List of Contributors
• Index