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"The real crime? Actually, the reality is these pukes are all guilty of some really nasty stuff ~ the kind that gets you executed in the Third-World, and a promotion to be the boss of your production segment in Socialist Europe.
Plea bargaining should be abolished as rapidly as new prisons can be brought into service."

You're full of it. First off, there isn't nearly so much pleading down from terribly serious crimes to simple drug crimes as you seem to think. I just did a plea on a guy on a delivery charge this morning. He did plead down from straight delivery to conspiracy to deliver to reduce the time he'll have to spend before he can parole out, but he'll still have to do about three and a half years before he'll be eligible for parole. Sometimes we can get a delivery or possession with intent to deliver charge reduced to a simple felony possession, but generally that's only going to happen if there isn't a good case on the underlying charge or if there are several co-defendants caught at the same time with the stuff in a car or something and the cops know who the real dealer is. The others might get stuck with just a possession charge. What doesn't happen though are cases where a guy is charged with something like robbery and then is allowed to plead to nothing but simple possession. Maybe the robbery might end up being worked down to a theft of something, depending on the circumstances, but if the guy had drugs he'll end up with a conviction for that too. Some of the people in prison fro drug possession are people initially charged with delivery possession with intent to deliver, but generally when that happens prosecutors either had a really weak case or the guy was just minimally involved or it only involved a tiny amount, or some or all of these factors are present. Most of the others there on possession charges went had prior criminal records, often other possession charges, so the prosecutor insisted on a prison sentence. It is true that few in for nothing but possessing a small user amount of drugs were people with clean records prior to their drug arrest, but that has happened in some cases.

Anyway, on abolishing plea bargains, that would absolutely bankrupt us. You know don't you that a good 95% or better of all criminal cases are resolved by plea. Nationwide only around 2.5% ever go to trial. In most cases people plea to the charges they were originally charged with. Many of them go to prison. I've pled four people so far this week and in three out of four cases my clients accepted prison sentences and will end up doing two years or more before they can get out. Three out of four pled to the charges they were originally charged with, and the one I already told you about was only modified slightly. He was just in the room when a drug deal for a tiny amount of meth occurred, but it wasn't his dope and he wasn't profiting from the transaction. He probably would have gotten a better deal had he not already been on a suspended sentence for possession.

We arrest more people now than at any point in our history. We incarcerate more people than we ever have, on a per captita basis and in total. Prior to 1980, our per capita incarceration rate had never been higher than 137 per 100,000 in state and federal prisons. The old record had been set in 1939, but for most of the twentieth century our incarceration rate hovered around 100 per 100,000, sometimes less, sometimes more, but it rarely ever topped 120 per hundred thousand. Today it is 486 per 100,000. If you count those in jails along with those in prisons, it goes on up to 726 per 100,000. This is the highest incarceration rate in the entire world. We now have more people behind bars on a per capita basis and in total than any other country in the world. The only countries with incarceration rates anywhere close to ours are places like Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and other wonderful places like that...and the others sharing the top ten spot with us are all a good bit behind us with incarceration rates in the 400's to 600's per hundred thousand range. All this locking people up entirely unprecedented in this country. There is nothing conservative about it. It is costing us a fortune, and you want to kick it up several notches?

I cannot imagine how we would ever try all the criminal cases we get. The caseload in the criminal justice system is staggering as it is. Even only trying about 2.5% of the cases those of us working in the system have more work than we can handle. The dockets are so full it takes us months and months to ever get a courtroom for a trial. If we couldn't plea bargain our cases, there would have to be several more courtrooms built even in my small town. We'd have to hire several more judges, bailiffs, court reporters, clerks, security personnel, prosecutors and staff to help them, public defenders and staff to help them, and on and on and on. The cost would be astronomical. Citizens would revolt because every time they turned around they'd be being called in for jury duty.

People have just gone prison crazy in the last twenty-five years or so. I don't know what the hell people are thinking. Prison isn't worth a flip for doing anything but keeping the really bad people off the streets and away from the rest for a while. The problem is that we put so many in nowadays that we have to keep letting them all out earlier and earlier because we just cannot afford to keep building more and more prisons. In many cases we aren't able to keep the really dangerous people in prison nearly long enough because we are always having to make room for the new guys. It's crazy. We are spinning our wheels and blowing a fortune in the process. People need to understand that prison is a limited resource and we need to wise up and make the best possible use of it.