Get your brain around it. One of every one hundred adults in the United States is in jail or prison. That’s more than anywhere else in the world.
Now I’m quite certain some countries would be ahead of us in the count were they absent the habit of just killing folks. Still, it’s disturbing. A couple of questions that came immediately to my mind:
- Think any of them are non-violent drug offenders?
- Think any of them are the result of ineffective laws, mindlessly passed to demonstrate “getting tough on crime” to a bleating electorate?
If nothing else has destroyed my chances, this will: as President of the United States, I would pardon all non-violent marijuana convicts on my first day in office. If that’s as little as 3% of the prison population, that’s 69,000 people. Then we’d get to work on the rest of it. The asset forfeiture, the violence, the clogged legal system…they’re all disasters.
Certainly there are valid roles for government regulation here. I don’t think there is even a remotely reasonable case for making cocaine and heroin as available as bread and milk, for example.
But the “War on Drugs,” in its current manifestation, is a complete failure. I no longer question whether the cure is worse than the illness. I know it is. It’s past time for rational discussion on life beyond it.
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Have you seen Traffic?
I’ve NOT seen Traffic, though I’ve been told (by you, Seester?) that I should.
These are questions that I leave to people much smarter than I. While I agree that a good many people are in jail for ridiculous reasons, a good many of them AREN’T – they certainly don’t belong out in the world with us and our children.
I’m not sure that even prison is the answer for some of these people, though, and it makes my brain (and my soul) hurt to think of humane and compassionate solutions to dealing with inhumane and uncompassionate people.
Yeah, I haven’t seen Traffic either. I’d add it to my Netflix queue if I had one.
Mrs. Chili, sure there are some people who need to be incarcerated, and I don’t want them out either. I think I do want the guy out whose grow-light was detected (warrantlessly, of course) with a police heat sensor, though.
And come ON with the “much smarter than I”! There is no “they.” “They” are US.
The thing is, Bo, it may not be a matter of “smart”, but I don’t feel qualified to make those kinds of decisions. The guy with the grow light was breaking the law as we decided it should be set up. How do we adequately discourage that kind of behavior?
Personally, I’d vote for some fines community service instead of jail time (we’ve got potholes that need filling and weeds that need whacking), but others have decided, for whatever reasons, that’s not enough (or feasible).
It overwhelms my intellect to try to solve these kinds of problems – I can’t even figure out how to get my students to do their damned homework…