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People sometimes get life in prison for selling less than a gram of cocaine, let alone 200 pounds. Selling any amount of any Schedule I or Schedule II drug that is a narcotic or methamphetamine in my state is punishable by up to life in prison. For whatever reason cocaine and several other hard drugs are considered “narcotics” for the purpose of the law even though they are not narcotics. In the same court where the guy got a sentence that will only keep him in a few months, I recently saw a Vietnam Vet with a clean record get 30 years for selling a half of a gram of methamphetamine to some drug addled lady who called him several times begging him to find her some dope so she could get the whole transaction on tape. There was no evidence presented at that trial that this guy was any sort of regular drug dealer, only that he had done this one transaction after she had called him several times. She even had to wait for him when he left to buy the dope from someone else. She had set him up and a couple of others to get out of trouble. I was kind of shocked by that verdict. People regularly get less for things like burglary or violent crimes where people are seriously injured, even sometimes for murder.

I think our priorities are all screwed up in the criminal justice system, but it’s far less liberal than you would think. Maybe it’s just in the south where I live, but even Democrat judges and prosecutors are out to lock up as many people as possible. They want to come across as tough on crime. If they look like liberal wussies, they’d never get elected in the first place and they surely wouldn’t get reelected. There is no penalty for being too hard on people, but a big penalty for appearing soft on crime. It’s pretty much the same for legislators. They are always passing new tough on crime laws, making conduct that wasn’t a crime a crime, turning misdemeanors into felonies, increasing the classification of felonies so the punishments are more severe, adding new sentence enhancements. With much fanfare they introduce more and more legislation so they can appear tough on crime to voters.

The problem with all this is though that we have no more room in our prisons and jails. Like every other state we’ve built prisons and jails like crazy over the last few decades. Our incarceration rate has gone through the roof and we just don’t have the money to keep increasing the number of prison beds, so, we are starting to let people out earlier and earlier. The same legislators who trip over each other passing all these new tough on crime laws with much less fanfare are having to pass new measures that let people out of prison earlier, often before the prisoners actual parole eligibility date. Not only that, but our parole board is now paroling almost everyone the first time they come before the parole board, even violent offenders and/or habitual offenders. They have to do this because they have to clear out space for all the new convicts. Not too many years ago if someone was sentenced to prison on Wednesday he’d be transported from the jail to the prison by the end of the week. Now it takes several months and there is no room in the jails to keep these people. Almost all of them will be released on reporting bonds, often signature reporting bonds. They just call in every night and don’t have to turn themselves in until a prison bed becomes available. And of course these people party like crazy and go nuts and often get in a lot more trouble before a bed opens up.

Tell me something. Is an increase of more than five times the number of people we have behind bars “liberal,” or is it “conservative?” That’s what we’ve seen in this country since the late 1970’s. It went from a few hundred thousand to millions. Throughout most of the 20th century our incarceration rate was pretty much flat. It started creeping up in the late 1970’s. We hit a new all time high record in 1979, and since have hit new records every year such that we now lock up a percentage of our population several times what it was at any time prior to the late 1970’s. This has been entirely unprecedented, something we’d never seen before in this country, a radical departure for us. We now lock up more people than any other country in the world, even those with populations much larger than ours. We only have something like 5% of the world’s total population, yet about 25% of those behind bars in the world are behind bars right here in the land of the free. Is this what you call “liberalization?” I’d say we’ve made liberal use of prisons, that’s for sure. It sure hasn’t been “conservative.”

I think there is a major disconnect between perception and reality for most when it comes to our criminal justice system. I think the perception among most conservatives is that we are overrun with liberal judges and prosecutors letting people off left and right with slaps on the wrists because they don’t want to punish anybody. The reality I think is that there are hardly any prosecutors or judges like that, and generally if prosecutors or judges are letting people off scott free or with slaps on the wrists who ought to have been nailed hard they haven’t had much choice in the matter. They don’t have a place to put them or they don’t think a jury will go along with them or whatever. In my experience judges and prosecutors really don’t like giving in. They don’t like going easy on people, even Democrat judges and prosecutors. I could give you all sorts of anecdotal evidence, but there really isn’t much point in that, just familiarize yourself with the statistics. Look at what’s happened with incarceration rates and prison and jail populations. If we were going so easy on people in the system our incarceration rate would be dropping. We wouldn’t be setting new records every year.

Here’s a good place to start if you want to look at the numbers and get the real facts: http://www.albany.edu/sourcebook/tost_6.html#6_b