Goccalves Evaluate Social Costs

Goncalves evaluates social costs via four different drug-related categories, prison expenditures, court expenditures, police force costs, and individual (the imprisoned user) income/productivity lost due to drug-related imprisonment. In all of these categories, strike police expenditures, the overall cost, quantified monetarily, decreased following the adoption of the NSFAD in 2001. Total prison expenditures associated with drug-related imprisonment was halved from 70 million Euros in 1999 to 35 million Euros in 2010. Total court expenditures related to drug offences decreased from just above 70 million Euros to just below 30 million Euros in the same span of time. However, Glenn Greenwald, in contrast with Goncalves’ findings, found that, “the number of cases referred to the administrative process has increased slowly and more or less steadily since the enactment of decriminalization in 2001” (5). …show more content…
The total lost income for drug-related prisoners fell from approximately 45 million Euros to 25 million Euros from 1999 to 2010. Similarly the total lost productivity for drug-related prisoners fell from 35 million Euros to about 17 million Euros in the same span of time. The graphs that correspond with prison expenditures, court expenditures, lost income, and lost productivity can be viewed in Figure 1 in the Appendix. Overall, these findings display that following the adoption of the NSFAD there was a general trend of a significant reduction in the financial burden of drug use on society as a