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The amount of money that American taxpayers spend on prisons has never been greater, and the fraction of the American population held in prison has tripled during the last 15 years, as has national prison capacity. Yet the expected punishment of violent criminals has declined, and violent crime flourishes at intolerably high levels. The seeming paradox of more prisons and less punishment for violent criminals, which means less public safety, is explained by the war on drugs. That war has gravely undermined the ability of America's penal institutions to protect the public. As prisons are filled beyond capacity with nonviolent "drug criminals" (many of them first offenders), violent repeat offenders are pushed out the prison doors early, or never imprisoned in the first place.

David B. Kopel is research director of the Independence Institute in Golden, Colorado, and an associate policy analyst of the Cato Institute. A former assistant attorney general for the state of Colorado, he is the author of The Samurai, the Mountie, and the Cowboy (Cato/Prometheus, 1992), which was named Book of the Year by the American Society of Criminology's Division of International Criminology.