OK, so you refuse to take a stand under the guise of “well isn’t it obvious!?”
See if you can at least answer this one question: To balance the inequity, should we release some of the black criminals or lock up more white ones?
Problem is, the death penalty process is neither expeditious nor an efficient way to spend our resources.
Not the way it is now…
But as I said in my post, you’re really comparing apples and oranges here. The US is considerably larger and considerably more diverse than than any other first world country. Race, culture, and socioeconomics play a very different role here than they do in a country like the UK or Germany or whatever. This is why I’m saying it’s these factors that we need to address and culture isn’t the sort of thing a government can fix.
One of the major differences that we can do is that other countries are starting to decriminalize certain drugs, particularly marijuana, and the US hasn’t done that. I think a few steps like that would certainly go a long way toward lessening our imprisoned population, lessening crime, and weakening gangs and organized crime, but I think it’s lagging behind largely because of cultural reasons right now.
Frankly, this is just silly. A father doesn’t need to make every single baseball game and always know the right words to say and never lose his temper before he can tell his neighbor that beating his son is wrong. Yes, the US has a way to go with human rights, but even the majority of our prisoners have it better than many of the Chinese. We certainly should be prancing around like the paragon of human rights, but we can certainly berate a country like China for some of the horribly attrocities they commit.
Yes, the poor and disadvantaged need more options, but a lot of them aren’t the sorts of things you can legislate. Gangs aren’t something you can legislate away. Breaking a cycle of broken families isn’t something you can legislate away. I think situations are improving, just very slowly, and it may take several generations more still before things finally level out.
I think the fragmentation you’re witnessing is that this board isn’t made up of my-country-right-or-wrong types. We seem entrenched because its been continually demanded that we don’t think. And you can’t be loud on a message board.
Are you advocating incarceration Affirmative action?
We are, strangely we seemed to be united on the fact that people breaking the law need to do the time prescribed before they committed the act.
Or in the very least, strike a more definitive position so theres more for us to mock.
Besides, even if you feel problems exist, prisons are not the problem. Prisons are the results of the problems.
It’s like going to a cemetery and being shocked by how many people died before the age of thirty. And then taking a vow to devote your life to cemetery reform.
If you want to fix the problems you see inside prisons, you need to step outside of the prisons and fix the problems that exist in the rest of the world. Do that and you’ll find your prison problems disappear.
Well, to be fair, PV seems to recognize that; it’s just that he seems to think if we all pronounce the mantra ‘opportunity, social justice, social inclusion’, things will magically get better.
But if 1/4 of the prisoners were released we’d still have more people in jail than any other country.
Nope. I vote for cowshit.
Actually on edit, I’m thinking mouseshit.
More importantly, even if all drugs were legalised, we wouldn’t actually release 1/4 of all prisoners.
It’s interesting the lengths that page goes to hide the facts. Nowhere does it actually tell us how many people are in jail solely because of drugs charges. It goes on at great lengths about the number of people convicted of drugs crimes, but makes no mention of how many of these were convicted of multiple crimes.
So while 25% of prisoners have been sentenced in part for drug crimes, we have no idea how many would have been sentenced even if drugs were legal.
We can get some sort of idea by looking at the following figures:
“..of drug offenders in federal prisons… 91.4% are serving time for trafficking offenses”
“…of persons sentenced for a drug offense in 2002… in 87% of cases no weapon was involved.”
How many would have been sentenced to jail for weapons offences, tax fraud, selling controlled substances etc even if drugs were 100% legal is anybody’s guess.
What’s even worse is that, without the drugs as a motivation, how many violent crimes wouldn’t have happened?
Fine! You’re a sheeple. Baaaahhh. Happy now? 
And just to edit my last post, since the edit window is closed, I think Batshit would have been better.
Frog shit.
As Blake pointed out, a lot of people are convicted and imprisoned for drug crimes. But very few people are imprisoned for just drug crimes.
If you’re a drug addict who goes out and robs a convenience store, you might get convicted of armed robbery, criminal possession of a weapon, and some drug crimes. Even if they gave a general amnesty for all drug crimes, you’re still going to be in prison for armed robbery and criminal possession of a weapon.
Here is a summary of a study allegedly prepared by the US Attorney General’s office in Feb. 1994 regarding mandatory sentencing for “low level drug offenders” and prison/court overcrowding. The numbers aren’t actually as staggering as some would claim, but tens of thousands of people considered to be “low level” drug offenders (by the strictest definition - not involved in any other crimes, no past criminal history, and no violence associated with their drug crime) are serving average sentences of 81 months in prison for these ‘low level’ crimes.
If you remove the stipulation that the offender have absolutely no past criminal history and only stipulate that all their past crimes were also non-violent drug related offenses the number grows, and if you remove that stipulation and leave it at only ‘non-violent’ then the numbers do start to become significant when you have to pay for that many people sitting in prison cells for 5-7 years for basically nothing more than being addicts.
From the link provided byt Crazyhorse, people incrcerated for drugs who have no other criminal history amount to just 28% of drug offenders in prison. So rather than “decriminalising” 25% of prisoners, decriminalising drugs would reduce the number of criminals by just 8% at most.
Nothing more than being addicts? Your list includes burglars, frauds, armed robbers, extortionists and many, many other criminals who committed crimes with “no violence”.
While you may think it’s that a burglar who breaks into a teenage girl’s bedroom in the middle of the night is guilty of " basically nothing more than being [an] addict", I can assure you, she won’t feel the same way.
These people are not a minor problem in US society. These people cost society vast amounts. I’ve seen reputable analyses that indicate that through actual thefts, inflated insurance, expenditure on security, loss of flexibility due to fear and so forth these “non-violent” offenders chew up 10-30% of GDP. That is a staggering amount.
And lest you think the losses are “only” monetary, consider that these wasted resources could otherwise have gone to improvements in health care, solving or reducing violent crime, improvements in safety and so forth. Then we factor in people who suffer health problems because they do not feel safe to exercise for fear of being mugged or having their car broken into while parked at the gym, or because gym memberships are expensive because of the costs of security to avoid these problems
The idea that people who are commit “non-violent” crimes are being jailed for “basically nothing more than being addicts” is a gross misrepresentation. They are being jailed for committing serious crimes that are a massive economic, psychological and health lliability for society.
These people are in no sense “just addicts”.
I’ve gone on record as saying I legalize all drugs if the choice was up to me. But don’t think that would be some panacea solving all of society’s problems. Even if you made the legalization retroactive, you wouldn’t be releasing very many prisoners. As we’ve pointed out, most drug users were also convicted of other crimes.
I ado agree that drug legalization would have an eventual effect of prison populations. If drugs were legalized many drug users would not need to commit other crimes to finance their drug use. That would eventually bring down prison populations.
But like I said, no panacea. Drug legalization would, by any reasonable forecast, increase drug use - there’s got to be some people who are deterred from using drugs by their illegality. And increased drug use would bring a bunch of problems unrelated to crime statistics.
So we legalize drugs and send fewer young men to prison. Instead we sent more young men to morgues. And I suppose people like the OP will ask what kind of society allows its young people to kill themselves in such great numbers.
As I said the numbers aren’t as staggering as some would claim but they do make an impact on not only the overcrowded courts and prisons, but obviously on the lives of those prisoners too.
I may not think that, nor did I ever imply or provide a cite that said or implied it. You have apparently misinterpreted the summary of the report that I cited. A burglar robbing someone in order to obtain drug money would not be included in these numbers they would be in prison for robbery not drug offenses. The report (prepared by the US Attorney General I might remind you, in an effort to demonstrate the rapid growth of the very prison population we are discussing) spells out that their definition of “low level drug offender” for the purposes of the study excludes other criminal activity, not just violent activity. The 12,727 prisoners defined by the strictest definition of “low level” in prison in 1994 were not, by definition, contributing to any of the costs to society that you mention. They were just addicts.
There are more possibilities than the outright legalization of all controlled substances or total criminalization of them all. In an imaginary world where full drug legalization might happen, we could also imagine that drugs could only be purchased legally under medical supervision including counseling and rehab if desired, all paid for by the billions of dollars of additional tax revenues that could be imposed on the sellers of such drugs. At the same time as calculating whatever ramifications that had on our prison populations, we would have to reduce from the world’s count of violent crimes all the crimes committed by organized drug gangs, mafia, basic street level thugs, etc. as part of the current illegal distribution system which would be eliminated by such a bold move almost overnight. That is a lot of the “other” prisoners that do fall under the violent and dangerous category completely out of a job and source of income.