This data provides a time series for the output performance measures as published in Budget Paper No. 3 for the years 2014-15, 2013-14, 2012-13, 2011-12, 2010-11 and 2009-10.
Historical performance measures have been matched to the 2014-15 output structure to provide a relevant time series for the same measure, even where they have been renamed or restructured over time.
Measures that have been discontinued are not included, except for measures that are proposed to be discontinued in the 2014-15 Budget (Appendix A).
Detailed explanations for the creation of new measures or discontinuation of existing measures from a particular year are available in Budget Paper No. 3 for the relevant year.

The largest amount of federal drug control spending was reported for FY 2023 with some 44.2 billion U.S. dollars. The requested funding 2025 is slightly higher. This statistic depicts the total federal drug control spending in the United States from FY 2012 to FY 2025, in million U.S. dollars.

U.S. drug control spending

In the United States, around half of the requested budget for federal drug control spending in 2025 was requested for treatment of substance use disorders; the remaining budget was distributed amongst various governmental departments for prevention, interdiction, and law enforcement. In particular, the largest amount of drug control treatment funding in 2024 within the Department of Health and Human Services was spent by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, followed by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

Drug control and the opioid epidemic

The misuse of prescription drugs and the opioid epidemic are a major focus of U.S. drug control strategies and spending. In the U.S., the top controlled prescription drugs distributed are hydrocodone and oxycodone, both potentially addictive opioid analgesics that can be misused and sold illegally. In 2010-2019, efforts to reduce illegal sales of opioid narcotics in the U.S. have managed to reduce the amount of opioids diverted from the legal market by over half. Unfortunately, misusing opioids and synthetic variants such as heroin can be life-threatening; death rates due to opioid overdoses are continuing to rise.

The United Kingdom spent approximately 7.41 billion British pounds on its prison system in 2024/25, an increase when compared to the previous year. Between 2011/12 and 2019/20, the UK consistently spent less than it did in 2010/11, mainly due to the austerity policies pursued by the coalition Government of the time. Throughout this time period, expenditure on prisons was lowest in 2014/15 at 3.83 billion pounds and highest in the most recent financial year. Prisoners and prison costs The prisoner population of the United Kingdom was around 97,800 in 2024. Although this was quite a high figure in historical terms, the incarceration rate in England and Wales, and Scotland has fallen slightly since 2008, although it has increased slightly in Northern Ireland. There is, however, evidence that the government is struggling to cope with the size of the prison population. The number of spare prison places in England and Wales fell to a low of just 768 in September 2023. The average cost of a prison place has also increased, rising from 35,182 pounds in 2015/16, to 56,987 in 2023/24. Steep rise in prison violence in the mid-2010s In 2018, there were almost 33,000 assault incidents in England and Wales, with the annual number of assaults increasing rapidly from 2013 onwards. There has also been a rise in self-harm incidents at prisons, with over 79,000 occurring in 2024, compared with only 19,000 twenty-years earlier. The peak for the number of deaths in prison custody was in 2021, when there were 371, or around 4,7 deaths per 1,000 prisoners. Of these deaths, 89 of those in 2021 were recorded as suicides, with the most suicides occurring in 2016, at 124.

The crime rate in the United Kingdom was highest in England and Wales in 2024/25, at **** crimes per 1,000 people, compared with Scotland, which had **** crimes per 1,000 population, and Northern Ireland, at **** crimes per 1,000 people in 2023/24. During this time period, the crime rate of England and Wales has usually been the highest in the UK, while Scotland's crime rate has declined the most, falling from **** crimes per 1,000 people in 2002/03, to just **** by 2021/22. Overall crime on the rise In 2024/25, there were approximately **** million crimes recorded by the police in England and Wales. Although this was a slight decline on the previous two years, it was still far higher than during the mid-2010s. While crime declined quite significantly between 2002/03 and 2013/14, this trend went into reverse in subsequent years. While there are no easy explanations for the recent uptick in crime, it is possible that reduced government spending on the police service was at least partly to blame. In 2009/10, for example, government spending on the police stood at around **** billion pounds, with this cut to *****billion in 2013/14. One of the most visible consequences of these cuts was a sharp reduction in the number of police officers in the UK. Between 2010 and 2017, the number of officers fell by 20,000, although the number of officers returned to pre-austerity levels by the 2020s. A creaking justice system During the period of austerity, the Ministry of Justice as a whole saw its budget sharply decline, from *** billion pounds in 2009/10 to just **** billion by 2015/16. Although there has been a reversal of the cuts to budgets and personnel in the justice system, the COVID-19 pandemic hit the depleted service hard in 2020. A backlog of cases grew rapidly, putting a strain on the ability of the justice system to process cases quickly. In 2022, for example, it took on average *** days for a crown court case to go from offence to conclusion, compared with *** days in 2018. There is also the issue of overcrowding in prisons, with the number of prisoners in England and Wales dangerously close to operational capacity in recent years.