Head-Spinning Political Shit!

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by Toughy

There is some huge ass number of folks in CA prisons and jails who have been convicted on non-violent drug offenses (many of them male POC). How about, they ALL get to go free and we end the stupid fucking 'war on drugs'.

That would be a good start. You know what drives me to distraction about this ill-conceived policy? We've seen this movie. We *know* it doesn't work. It was called Prohibition. There is absolutely no reason to make narcotics illegal. There is no more logic behind it than there was making booze illegal. But it certainly 'feels' good in that it makes us believe we're doing 'something'.

What's even more disturbing is that this undermines our criminal justice system in a very profound manner. Think about the differential fates of the following people:

1) Young middle-class black woman gets caught with a pipe and a quarter ounce of green bud. She is going to go to jail, possibly prison for a few years.

2) Young, upper-middle class white woman gets caught with an eight-ball of coke. She gets community service and maybe rehab.

3) Young, poor black man gets caught with three or four rocks of crack cocaine. He's going to prison for a decade.

4) Young, upper-class white man does a sophisticated three-card monty game on the stock market, brings three or four companies to their knees, causing a couple of thousand people to be thrown out of work, ten percent of those folks lose their homes. He winds up a hero with his face on the cover of Business Week and a billion dollar bonus in his pocket.

Do those fates--and it is very difficult to argue that this sketch isn't realistic--seem reasonable to anyone here given the magnitude of effects these actions have in the real world?

I would argue that, in fact, the severity of punishment should be almost precisely the *opposite* of what you see above. The stock market con artist should be looking at spending most of the rest of his natural days behind bars, the middle two drug offenders should be given the option of rehab if they have a problem and otherwise let go and the first person should never even find her day disturbed by the police at all.

Cheers
Aj