Some of top stories of 2012 that capture the momentum gained in this extraordinary year of change, which promise to present an exit strategy to the disastrous war on drugs.

The Prison Policy Initiative was founded in 2001 by Peter Wagner. While they are most famous for their work documenting how mass incarceration skews American democracy, they're also demonstrating how mass incarceration impacts everyone, not just those directly involved in the criminal justice system, empowering new voices to help set criminal justice policy.

Colorado & Washington State recently voted to legalize cannabis. Winston Ross of The Daily Beast takes a practical look at Washington’s new cannabis law.

If lengthy mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug addicts actually worked, one might be able to rationalize them. But there is no evidence that they do. 

When Barack Obama was elected in 2008, it was hailed by many as a final triumph over race. Some people muttered at the time that the US remains a deeply racially divided country, and that Obama’s victory was one merely at the level of political symbols. Four years later, it is hard to overstate quite how vindicated the latter group have been.

The U.S. has the highest reported incarceration rate in the world. Pro Publica has just compiled some of the best investigative journalism on U.S. prisons and the problems that plague them.

The main aim of the report was to look at the existing research on twenty countries to establish whether the adoption of a decriminalised policy led to significant increases in drug use - the simple answer is that it did not.