Those with personal experiences of arrests—as either offender, victim, or acquaintance—expect greater arrest risks than citizens without such experiences .Those with personal experience in offending without sanctions perceive lower sanctioning risks than the broad non-offending public .Unfortunately, most of these studies have examined relative risk on Likert-type attitude scales, rather than assessing actual knowledge of the criminal statutes. Williams, Gibbs, and Erickson surveyed the beliefs of 2400 Arizona adults about the penalties in their state for nineteen different crimes. They found moderate correlations between perceived and actual statutory maximums, but public beliefs were more strongly correlated with their attitudes toward appropriate sanctioning than with their knowledge of actual sanctioning. It is also possible that citizens’ beliefs are shaped by legal tradition and fail to reflect more recent legal reform. Darley et al. examined public beliefs about sanctions for various crime scenarios, and found that citizens’ intuitions better corresponded to the traditional common law than to the newer Model Penal Code in force in their state. We are aware of only one previous study examining the accuracy of citizen beliefs about their state marijuana laws, and it is quite dated. Using the Monitoring the Future survey of high school seniors, Johnston, O’Malley, and Bachman reported ratings for the Classes of 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979, and 1980 on the item “Which best describes the law IN YOUR STATE regarding marijuana? Possession in private of an ounce or less of marijuana is…” In Table 2, we summarize their results for the Classes of 1976 and 1980. The most striking feature of Table 2 is the obvious difference in perceptions across states as a function of their legal status.
In the early change states, ebb and flow only 14% to 16% of citizens believed marijuana possession carried a possible jail sentence. In the late change states the proportion of citizens holding this belief dropped precipitously, from 58% in 1976 to 18% by 1980. In non-decriminalization states, roughly a third of citizens believed marijuana possession was punishable by jail: 39% in 1976, 35% in 1980. The contrast to the actual statutory penalties described in Table 1 is quite striking. In the U.S. in the 1970s, it appears that many people were aware of their state marijuana laws. As Johnston and colleagues summarized their results: “In sum, we can say from the data just reviewed that there were substantial shifts in the perceptions of prevailing laws, but also that there were sizeable segments of the population in all three types of states who either did not know what the law was, or who very likely had an incorrect perception of what it was. In the decriminalized states roughly 10-20% of the respondents still believed that the penalty could include a jail sentence, while in non-decriminalized states roughly 30-40% incorrectly believed that a jail sentence was not an option.” Thus, it appears that in the 1970s, when most decriminalization reforms were still recent, citizens were moderately accurate in their knowledge of these laws. But as reviewed above, it is no longer certain that “decriminalization” as a label accurately distinguishes actual state differences in statutory maximum penalties for marijuana possession. In the remainder of this paper, we examine the accuracy of citizen perceptions using much more recent survey data, and we do so in a way that accounts for the complexity of state laws and for possible covariates that influence citizen perceptions. Starting in 2001 the National Survey on Drug Use or Health began inquiring about people’s knowledge of penalties associated with possession of one ounce of marijuana. We pooled data from the 2001, 2002, and 2003 National Surveys on Drug Use and Health.
The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration conducts the NSDUH survey annually for the primary purpose of estimating the prevalence of illicit drug, alcohol, and tobacco use in the United States. The NSDUH sample is drawn from a clustered, multistage sampling design, resulting in a nationally representative sample of non-institutionalized civilians. There are roughly 600 adult respondents 18 and older in each state in each annual cross-section. Respondents are not followed over multiple years. Interviews occur continuously throughout the calendar year and take roughly one hour to complete. To assure confidentiality, respondent names are not used; interviews are conducted in private; and sensitive questions about drug use are completed though audio-assisted computer interview technology where respondents key answers directly into a laptop computer in response to pre-recorded instructions.Several modifications to the survey design were initiated in 2002: a $30 incentive was paid for completed interviews, a program to monitor and improve interviewer quality was implemented, and the name of the survey was changed from the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse to the NSDUH. Our primary dependent measure for this analysis comes from a survey question inquiring about the respondent’s knowledge of state penalties for possession of one ounce of marijuana. In each wave of the survey used here, respondents are asked, “What is the maximum legal penalty in for first offense possession of an ounce or less of marijuana for your own use?” Possible responses were a fine, probation, community service, possible prison sentence, mandatory prison sentence, and Don’t know.
For the purposes of our analysis and to most closely match information on state penalties, we collapse responses into three categories: Fine, probation and/or community service; Don’t know, and possible or mandatory prison sentence. It is this categorical variable that is estimated using multi-nomial logistic regression. Additional information about the individual is also captured from these surveys to control for individual factors that may be associated with use and/or knowledge of the law. These include the following: gender , race/ethnicity , age , education , household composition , income , participation in a government assistance program, religious beliefs , marital status , employment status , school enrollment, and an indicator of whether the individual binge drank in the past 30 days.5 We also include as additional controls measures of the census region the person resides in and the size of the MSA . time offenders was collected by the MayaTech Corporation as part of the ImpacTeen project . The penalties represent laws in effect as of January 1st of each year and include the minimum and maximum jail term, minimum and maximum fine, conditional discharge provisions, and expungement provisions for the lowest two quantity trigger amounts, which capture amounts of one ounce or less for all states.The conditional discharge variable reflects instances where compliance with the specified conditions leads to a dismissal of charges. For the purposes of this analysis, we collapse information collected from these statutes into two alternative sets of policy variables. The first group represents the actual laws in terms of the maximum fine statutorily imposed for possession of an ounce of marijuana, the maximum jail time statutorily imposed, the possibility of diversion to treatment, an education program, or community service for first time offenders, and the presence of conditional discharge provisions for first time offenders . This first group is the most correct assessment of these laws, but unlikely to be known precisely even by educated individuals. Thus, we also construct a second group of policy variables intended to reflect the public’s general understanding of each state’s law. For example, we construct an indicator of whether the state has no maximum jail time mandated,dry racks whether diversion is allowed for any offender, and whether only a fine is imposed by the state. This second group of policy variables are intended to capture the most salient aspects of the statutory laws and are presumed to be better predictors of knowledge. To capture the risk of getting caught using marijuana, information on marijuana possession arrests are obtained from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Report . The UCR system provides information on the number of crimes reported to the police in specific crime categories each year for every police jurisdiction in the United States. Arrests are reported by primary criminal offence. Data is collected on a monthly basis from approximately 17,000 law enforcement agencies and jurisdictions, although the crime and arrest data are not always complete from every agency. Each year, the Intra-university Consortium of Political and Social Research generates county-level arrest estimates from the incomplete agency data by imputing for missing values and makes these data available to the public. We aggregate these data to construct an estimate of marijuana possession arrests per capita within each state and match this variable to our data based on state of residence of the respondent.Our analysis focuses on 135,388 adults age 18 and older, among whom are 25,015 past-year and 14,739 past-month marijuana users . We exclude individuals under 18 years of age because some states differ in their treatment of adults and juveniles and hence statutory penalties may not actually apply to all juvenile offenders. We also exclude a small percent of respondents with missing data on a few key control variables, including gender and religiosity. Imputed values, constructed by RTI for SAMHSA, on race/ethnicity, education, income, marital status and family composition were used to avoid excessive loss of observations.
We used a ‘restricted use file’ with geographic identifiers that enabled us to link state level policy information and arrest data to respondents in the NSDUH based on state of residence. Because of the sensitive nature of these restricted data, all analyses were conducted on site at SAMHSA by SAMHSA staff to protect confidentiality. Our dependent variable capturing knowledge of the state laws is a mutually exclusive, categorical variable, in that people respond that the maximum penalty is a fine , some jail time, or that they do not know. No state has a maximum fine not specified in the law, but the person is asked what they believe is the maximum penalty, so to some extent it is irrelevant that the state imposes multiple penalties, as the individual only identifies what they believe is the gravest penalty. Table 3 presents aggregated state population level information on the proportion of people reporting particular penalties. The first column of Table 3 presents the fraction of the state population reporting a particular maximum penalty across all states, regardless of the state’s actual penalties. On average we see that nearly one-third of the population do not know what the maximum penalty is for marijuana possession offences in their state and another third believe that possible or mandatory jail is the maximum offence. Note that 6% of the population reports that mandatory jail is the maximum offence for possession of an ounce of marijuana even though no U.S. state imposes a mandatory jail time for low-level marijuana possession offences. We next categorized states based on whether they were recognized in the literature as having a decriminalization policy or not . Although we showed in Table 1 that these policies do not reflect actual differences in the criminal status of marijuana offences, it may be the case that the mere label that has been applied to these states for the past 25 years might generate a greater awareness of the state’s actual penalties for those living within these states. If people living in decriminalized states were actually aware of this labeled policy , then we would expect that they would be less likely to report jail as the maximum penalty and more likely to report fines, probation, or community service as the maximum penalty than people living in non-decrim states. The findings in the second and third columns of Table 3 show that this is indeed the case, as people living in so-called decriminalized states are statistically less likely to report jail as the maximum penalty and more likely to report fines and/or probation as the maximum penalty. However, the actual magnitude of these differences is extremely modest and nearly 30% of people living in a so-called decriminalized state still report jail as the maximum penalty imposed.One explanation for this small difference in reported penalties is that we have mis-classified people based on decriminalization status, as several other states have also eliminated jail time for possession offences . So, in the second part of Table 3, we show differences in the fraction of the state population reporting specific penalties for states in which the jail times have been removed as a penalty and those that do not.