Release of Drug Offenders Strains Communities
In the 1980s and '90s, more than 1 million people in the United States were arrested each year on drug charges. Most went to prison. And for years, that's where they stayed… until now.
Hundreds of thousands of inmates, all by-products of a nearly four-decades-old war on drugs, are now pouring out of the nation's prisons. For the most part, they all return to the neighborhood they came from. Many of their communities are collapsing under the burden. LAURA SULLIVAN for NPR.