People should not be serving death or life sentences for something like getting caught with cocaine or weed. And yes that does happen.
I agree, but I will say it is much less expensive and often less dangerous to keep those little potheads and crack addicts in prison.
Watch any show like Cops or Live PD and you will see a parade of these ex-cons with an ounce of weed, no license, no registration suddenly run from cops and wind up crashing several vehicles. Then add in ambulance costs, court costs to put them back in prison every 2 or 3 years.
And that doesn’t count the cost of all the smash and grab crimes they commit, or assaults and vandalism they engage in while high and out of control.
Prohibitions don’t work. I would rather see them treated then prisoned. But it is usually a lot cheaper to lock them up than to let them commit dozens of damaging crimes every year to support their expensive habits, let alone risking the public’s safety.
Criminals are expensive in the wild. Even non-violent criminals.
People should not be serving death or life sentences for something like getting caught with cocaine or weed. And yes that does happen.
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I should think you know that’s not the real story.
Dopers are criminals. And often they are holding while committing far more serious crimes like rape, robbery or murder. Because too much time, money and effort is spent by prosecuting those crimes, it is easier and more effective to let them plead down to the possession charges. They go to jail. Criminals are off the streets. Everybody wins.
So. To complain that our jails are filled with drug users who are only serving time for possession is incorrect.
A few months ago, someone called me to extricate her from a bad situation. Then, some young men there discussed perpetrating a hit against me.
After I showed up and told the victim to get her things together to leave, one of the would-be assassins tried to get behind me to do the stabbing. But apparently, he may have felt that he couldn’t position himself well enough to carry it out.
I’m not putting up with it any more. Here are the obvious options for policy.
* Show us that war on drugs that we were promised. There’s been no war on drugs.
* Go ahead. Let them out of the hoosegows for increasingly more private residents to deal with when attacked. It appears that this is the way that policy is going so far.
* Disarm private residents with gun control and policies against self-defense, but know that mobs like those of the 1930s and before will follow. Law abiding people are pretty near fed up. This would be my favorite choice. Make my day.
There’s at least one guy currently serving something like 30-life, ostensibly for a low-level drug offense. His daughter has been very public about how “trivial” his crime is and how he should be let out. The mitigating circumstance is that although the actual offense is something like possession with intent, the reality is the guy had been running a large and violent drug ring for over a decade, and had been indirectly responsible for numerous deaths, both murders of competition and ODs of clients.
If you can show me a case where a death sentence was handed out in this country for possession of cocaine or weed with no other charges involved, I’ll donate $100 to the charity of your choice.