Police departments in Newport News, Virginia and High Point, North Carolina have offered drug dealers the option of avoiding prison if they quit dealing and accept community support. The Economist spells out the reasoning behind the radical approach, known as drug-market intervention (DMI):
Traditional drug policing targets both users and dealers. This poses three main problems. First, low-level dealers are eminently replaceable: arrest two and another two will quickly take their places, with little if any interruption to sales. Second, it tends to promote antagonism between the police and the mostly poor communities where drug markets are found. Arrests can seem random: only one in every 15,000 cocaine transactions, for instance, results in prison time, but those other 14,999 sales are just as illegal as that one. … Third, prison as a deterrent does not work. If it did, America would be the safest country on earth.
Shutting down markets, on the other hand, removes the conditions that let crime flourish. Drug sales may still occur in poor neighbourhoods, just as they do in wealthy ones, but they do so behind closed doors, and they do not have the same bad effect on community life.
The Dish 