This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, March 3rd, 2008. I'm Caleb Brown.

One of every 100 adult Americans is now in prison according to the Pew Center on the States.

What's driving the increase in population of America's prisons?

The War on Drugs.

Tim Lynch, director of the Cato Institute's Project on Criminal Justice, offers his thoughts.

We've now got 2.3 million people locked up in jails.

Now, for the average listener out there,

they're really not sure what to do with the number 2.3 million.

For the people who don't follow these things,

they're not sure what to make of the number. So I try to put it in

some kind of historical context and that is it took the United States about 200

years, a little bit more than 200 years to get to the 1 million person mark.

But it's taken us just about 20 years to go from 1 million to 2.3 million.

So that's how fast our prison population has been expanding. It's really been growing at leaps and bounds over the past 15 years.

The engine behind these numbers is the drug war. I know a lot of people take the view that look, you know, if people are in prison, they probably belong there, you know, if they do the crime, do the time, that sort of thing. It is true that if you put

certain people in prison, you will be stopping a lot of crime. If you lock up a rapist,

if you lock up a child molester, if you lock up a child molester if you lock up a career burglar or a mugger

somebody who gets up every day and his plan is to go out and rob people if you put

these career criminals behind bars, you were going to stop a lot of crime.

Those people should be locked up.

But behind these incredible numbers is really the drug trade, the drug war.

And when you lock up a petty drug dealer, you're not stopping crime because he is immediately

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