Posted on 03/25/2014 2:30:58 PM PDT by ThethoughtsofGreg
On March 24, Cara Sullivan went on The Jason Lewis Show to discuss the importance of criminal justice reforms, which include mandatory minimum sentencing reform, criminal intent requirements within the law, provisional licensing and the pervasiveness of overcriminalization in America. Cara is the director of ALEC’s Justice Performance Project, which works to highlight the need for reforms within our criminal justice system and recently produced the report, “Criminalizing America – How Big Government Makes a Criminal of Every American.”
Listen below to Cara’s hour-long segment on The Jason Lewis Show:
(Excerpt) Read more at americanlegislator.org ...
Bump for later.
Caught it live. Well worth the listen.
Hand in hand with over-regulation.
US has the highest rate of incarceration of any country.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rate
“US has the highest rate of incarceration of any country.”
Like everything the government touches, it becomes an industry unto itself (like education). Once enough government workers and politicians are involved, it becomes impossible to roll back - it is a permanent growing cost to Americans.
bump for later
What they are in process of doing is criminalizing good actions, and de-criminalizing crimes.
Yes we do, and an almost opaque Bureau of Prisons. Shameful at so many levels, for so many reasons.
I agree. For too long Republican’s have stood on the side of “Law and Order” and not on the side of “Logic and Freedom”.
It’s time to let every single person convicted of a victimless crime out of jail.
No Victim = No Crime.
It is time for the “prison industry” to be rolled back.
if they steal from corporations there are victims. the company, the shareholders, the customers, the company’s insurers.
if they do drugs there are victims, their kids, their families.
if they sell to people the people buying are the victims. sellers don’t give two sh1ts about people.
negative personal actions affect others. we are not in a vacuum where our bad choices only impact us.
you want them legal, get people in who will legalize them.
if they do drugs there are victims, their kids, their families.
So let’s throw their father/mother in jail. His family & kids are way better off then. Really?!
Our govt says this drug is good yet that drug is bad. Do this drug and we tax it, do that drug and you rot in jail and destroy your family.
Republicans public image is in the crapper. They could pivot and become “The Party of Family”. Let the Democrats own being “The Party of the State”.
Being the party of family values means you need to keep families together. Even if that means spending a billion dollars on drug treatment programs instead of another SuperMax prison.
legalizing family-destroying drugs won’ t make republicans the party of the family.
and you just proved my point about drugs affecting others than just the drug user or seller, when you complain it impacts other people too. thanks for confirming my point.
people ought to think about actions and the consequences maybe before doing them. nobody puts a gun to their head to take drugs, or sell them.
The same with drunks, but we don't make sure their families are destroyed, or at least suffer, by throwing alcohol users in prison and denying them access to Federal student aid, nor do we seize the assets of liquor store owners or folks suspected of having alcohol profits for selling booze.
The only sharp line I can see between legal psychoactive drugs (alcohol, nicotine and caffeine) and illegal ones is that the former were popular in Europe at the time of the American Founding, while the latter weren't. Sure some drugs are so evil in their effects on the user that trade in them (or giving them as gifts) should be kept illegal (crystal meth, extacy, "bath salts" and the nasty Russian concotion "krokodile" come readily to mind), as folks who sell them, even to willing buyers, or give them to others, are victimizing the customers.
But the attitude of "using drugs will ruin your life, and just to make sure, we'll ruin it for good with a criminal conviction and all kinds of legal disabilities if we catch you", trampling civil liberties with non-knock raids and property rights with forfeitures even on suspicion of being involved in the drug trade has only had the effect of giving the trade the the most ruthless and evil drug gangs, depriving the state of tax revenues on the trade, and filling prisons with folks whose crime was possessing more than some arbitrarily set weight or volume of some psychoactive substance which legislators decided indicated intent to sell at great expense to the taxpayer.
it isn’t up to the state to rehab people. just as it isnt to give people healthcare, or pay you when you arent working, or feeding your kids three times a day at school, or any other unconstitutional overreach the nanny state has expanded into.
it is to protect people by keeping the peace, to administer justice, and to punish wrongdoers. government is not designed or equipped to do charity, teach your kids, do every social welfare program one can think of, plus be your own personal conscience.
where have you been? we do put drunk drivers in prison. companies fire alcoholics.
in prison all addicts go thru detox because they can’ t get alcohol or drugs. that is a helpful aspect of prison for these people. they have no choice but to get off whatever they’re on.
no-knock raids are totally a different deal as swat was sold to people under false pretenses, as it was supposed to be used against drug houses and gangs, not the everyday solo individual. this is part of state dept pub 7277 freedom from war document to increase the us’ internal domestic security forces as the military is turned over more and more to global governance bodies to control. swat teams are the way they have accomplished this. the war on drugs was an excuse. at the same time it kept govt rolling in cash and assets. but that doesn’t mean undeserved awful people are in jail, or that certain terrible drugs shouldn’t be illegal.
most people can handle alcohol. can’ t say the same foir others. wew lose enoiugh people already to drunk, we don’t need to lose more to more potheads, crackheads, coke snifferes, meth-heads, speed feaks, heroin addicts or any other drug that gets you hooked quickly and soon becomes the only thing one gives a crap about.
So I guess you’d be all for prohibition of alcohol and the criminalization of nicotine.
Have you ever actually contemplated what it must be like to be in jail?
Drunk drivers. Not drunks. We don’t arrest folks for having a few bottles of booze with the equivalent intoxicating power of 25 grams of pot. There’s no large quantity of booze you can have in your liquor cabinet that creates a presumption that you were going to engage in a felony by selling the stuff like there is with any of the psychoactive substances that weren’t popular in Europe c. 1776. You don’t get arrested for having a wine cellar if your house is within 1000 feet of a school.
Companies fire folks whose drinking affects their job performance.
How about applying the same standards to other psychoactive substances we do do alcohol? If activities you undertake while under the influence endanger public safety, that, the endangerment of public safety, not the use per se, should be a crime like drunk driving. If using affects your job performance, you’ll get fired, not because you have some metabolite from whatever you were amusing yourself with on the weekend turn up in your urine.
Okay, so once they’re detoxed in prison and they’ve lost their job, and can’t find another one because of the pervasiveness of criminal background checks, what then? Clean and sober and on the dole, or more likely back to the drugs or booze because their life sucks thanks to being turned into criminals by your jackbooted nanny-state approach to what should be a public health problem, rather than a crime problem. How, precisely, does this help their family, whom you aver to be their “victims”?
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