Proportionality of sentences

People deprived of their liberty for drug offenses: The social costs of drug policy

2015-11-10T14:14:35+00:00

The Research Consortium on Drugs and the Law (Colectivo de Estudios Drogas y Derecho, CEDD) released a series of new studies showing that despite the current debate in Latin America on the need to re ...

Women Behind Bars

2015-05-26T10:51:15+00:00

Across Latin America, the effects of disproportionate punishment for low-level, non-violent drug offenses are particularly severe for women. To shed light on this issue, WOLA has created a photo essa ...

Technical Report on Alternatives to Incarceration for Drug-Related Offenses

2015-05-04T13:41:30+00:00

Convinced that responses to the drug problem should be comprehensive, centering on public health and human rights perspectives, the Government of Colombia, with the support of the Inter-American Drug ...

Drug courts: Equivocal evidence on a popular intervention

2015-03-31T13:55:53+00:00

Some countries have adopted drug treatment courts as a way to reduce drug-related incarceration. Drug treatment courts, also called “drug courts,” are meant to offer court-supervised treatment for dr ...

On the death penalty for drugs

2015-03-05T12:01:24+00:00

The Annual Report of the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB), released today, calls upon States that ‘continue to impose the death penalty for drug-related offences to consider abolishing th ...

The United States rethinks draconian drug sentencing policies

2015-02-03T08:29:12+00:00

Across the Americas, an unprecedented debate on drug policy reform is underway. While a regional consensus on what form those reforms should take remains elusive, there are at least two issues where ...

Moving Away from Drug Courts

2014-07-14T10:38:57+00:00

Drug courts have spread across the country, yet available research does not support their continued expansion. Most drug courts do not reduce imprisonment, do not save money or improve public safety, ...

The unintended negative consequences of the 'war on drugs'

2013-04-17T11:08:18+00:00

Criminalisation of drug users, excessive levels of imprisonment, and punitive sentencing practices, including mandatory sentencing, the death penalty and enforced ‘drug detention centres’, are some o ...

Addicted to punishment

2013-01-11T11:54:32+00:00

In Latin America, trafficking cocaine so it can be sold to someone who wants to use it is more serious than raping a woman or deliberately killing your neighbor. While it may seem incredible, that is ...

The Death Penalty for Drug Offences

2012-11-27T17:46:29+00:00

Executions for drug offences have escalated in countries such as Iran and Saudi Arabia against a trend towards abolition globally, reveals a new Harm Reduction International (HRI) report The Death Pe ...

Drugs, crime and punishment

2012-06-19T09:32:13+00:00

Proportionality is one of the key principles of the rule of law aiming to protect people from cruel or inhumane treatment. The principle has been established in international and regional human righ ...

Cause for Alarm

2012-04-04T10:14:44+00:00

The new report is the first to calculate the total number of females in prisons on drug offences in Europe and Central Asia. It provides an analysis of developments related to women drug offending an ...

Improving community health and safety in Canada through evidence-based policies on illegal drugs

2012-03-28T13:25:17+00:00

The use of illegal drugs remains a serious threat to community health. However, despite the substantial social costs attributable to illegal drugs, a well-described discordance between scientific evi ...

End the War on Drugs

2011-06-02T12:43:24+00:00

On June 2, 2011, the Global Commission on Drug Policy presented its report in New York, calling to break the taboo on debate and reform of international drug control policies. The high-profile panel ...

Response from IDPC to the Sentencing Council for England and Wales Consultation on the Drug Offences Guideline

2012-01-24T14:54:56+00:00

The Sentencing Council for England and Wales initiated a consultation process in order to produce definitive sentencing guidelines for drugs offences for the UK in the future. In order to feed into t ...

Conviction by Numbers

2011-05-17T17:05:52+00:00

Threshold quantities (TQs) for drug law and policy are being experimented with across many jurisdictions. States seem attracted to their apparent simplicity and use them to determine, for example, wh ...

Expert Seminar on Proportionality of Sentencing for Drug Offences

2011-06-24T16:55:00+00:00

There has in recent years been a renewed interest in the principle of proportionality in sentencing policy for drug offences. There has been official analysis of the issue by the International Narcot ...

Controlling and Regulating Drugs

2011-05-03T09:21:23+00:00

The New Zealand Law Commission was asked to address the efficacy of the Misuse of Drugs Act in reducing the demand for, and supply of, drugs prohibited under the International Drug Conventions. The C ...

Alternatives to Imprisonment

2011-04-11T09:53:07+00:00

The Sentencing Advisory Council has released a report on community attitudes towards the use of alternatives to imprisonment in Victoria. The report is based on the Victorian component of a national ...

Addicted to Courts

2011-03-30T11:45:12+00:00

America’s growing reliance on drug courts is an ineffective allocation of scarce state resources. Drug courts can needlessly widen the net of criminal justice involvement, and cannot replace the need ...