Abstract
This chapter, using survey data, studies the role of police, the courts, and prisons in the fight against illegal drugs. Who does the police arrest? Who are the illegal drug offenders that end up before a judge? Who are the felons that ultimately serve time in prison? In short, who gets prosecuted for drug sales and trafficking? This chapter explores how the criminal justice system in Latin America deals with those who break drug laws and what effect their action has on illegal drug markets. The vast majority of those who are apprehended and incarcerated are small-time dealers who are replaced by new ones soon after their arrest. The criminal justice system has had almost no impact on the booming drug business.
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- 1.
Not all cases are included since each country has different police corps and jurisdictions, and not all these departments report their data. These figures should be viewed as a threshold.
- 2.
Definition: “Total Drug-Related Crimes” means all intentional acts that involve the cultivation, production, manufacture, extraction, preparation, offering for sale, distribution, purchase, sale, delivery on any terms whatsoever, brokerage, dispatch, dispatch in transit, transport, importation, exportation, possession, or trafficking of internationally controlled drugs (UN-CTS M5.2). See the Drug-Related Crimes section under http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/statistics/crime.html.
- 3.
In the case of Peru, for example, a single trafficker reported sales for several million dollars, hiking the average up to US$497,555, though all of the other inmates reported transactions of less than US$10,000. In any case, the US$402 of the person who represents the median (exactly halfway between the lowest score and the highest) provides a more accurate estimate of the population as a whole.
- 4.
To avoid omissions and not incriminate the inmate, the question was worded as follows: According to the authorities, how much did you sell/traffic/deal in the crime you were accused of committing?
- 5.
In the United States, the incarceration rate multiplied by 11 between 1980 and 2002. During the same period, the price of cocaine fell 80% (Reuter and Caulkins 2011). Clearly, the data does not support the hypothesis that sanctions drive up the price of drugs and thus reduce drug use. In the United States, as sanctions rose, prices fell.
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Bergman, M. (2018). Drugs, Trafficking, and Criminal Justice. In: Illegal Drugs, Drug Trafficking and Violence in Latin America. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73153-7_6
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