Reply #18: It's fallacious to merely add such percentages to derive some specious result.

[TahitiNut]

Clearly, the people who've been incarcerated are INCLUDED in other rates, so that one can be thrown out. Unless you have some bizarre belief that the population of 'illegal aliens' don't do illicit drugs and the people who do illicit drugs are not illegal aliens, the percentages can't merely be added together. I would surmise (reasonably, I think) that illegal behavior is clustered - that there's a somewhat higher tendency that an individual who breaks one law will also break another.

That said ...

I have said for a long time that we jeopardize our freedoms and invite a "police state" when we criminalize behavior that large pluralities engage in. (This, I believe, was the root problem with Prohibition.) When there are more law-breakers than any reasonably-sized law enforcement system can deal with, then people in law enforcement can pick and choose when, where, and against whom they enforce the law. The higher the imbalance, the closer we get to police state conditions.

People seem all-too-willing to criminalize behavior ... from smoking to pot and from going over 55 mph on a clear and nearly vacant highway to stopping too long at an airport passenger drop off. But we don't seem to be anywhere nearly as willing to pay for the uniform enforcement of those laws - which leaves our prison system overpopulated with minorities.