December 27, 2014 11:03AM # Cato Scholars: Ahead of the Curve By [David Boaz](https://www.cato.org/people/david-boaz) --- SHARE Congratulations to former Treasury secretary Robert Rubin, who has become concerned, [as he writes in the Wall Street Journal](http://www.wsj.com/articles/robert-rubin-and-nicholas-turner-the-steep-cost-of-americas-high-incarceration-rate-1419543410), that > The U.S. rate of incarceration, with nearly one of every 100 adults in prison or jail, is five to 10 times higher than the rates in Western Europe and other democracies, according to a groundbreaking, 464-page [report](http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=18613) released this year by the National Academy of Sciences. America puts people in prison for crimes that other nations don’t, mostly minor drug offenses, and keeps them in prison much longer. Of course, if he’d been following the work of the Cato Institute, he could have read about the problems of drug prohibition and mass incarceration in this [2009 symposium at Cato Unbound](http://www.cato-unbound.org/issues/march-2009/behind-bars-land-free), this 2013 paper on [incarceration rates](https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/cato-papers-public-policy/2013/6/cppp-2-4.pdf) in the United States and other countries, [this Washington Post article by Tim Lynch](https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/population-bomb-behind-bars) in 2000 when the U.S. prison population first exceeded 2 million, or indeed my 1988 [New York Times article](https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/lets-quit-drug-war) on the excessive arrests and intrusions on freedom in the drug war. Meanwhile, on the same page of Friday’s Wall Street Journal, former senator James L. Buckley [calls for ending federal aid to the states](http://www.wsj.com/articles/james-l-buckley-how-congress-bribes-states-to-give-up-power-1419541292?KEYWORDS=buckley), an idea central to his new book *Saving Congress from Itself* and inspired by [the work of Cato’s Chris Edwards](http://www.downsizinggovernment.org/fiscal-federalism). ##### Related Tags [Constitutional Law](https://www.cato.org/constitutional-law), [Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies](https://www.cato.org/robert-levy-center-constitutional-studies) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).