200,000 Convicts To Be Released

[Abraham]

gringo pistolero

Huh?

[The Annoyed Man]

...and (I forgot to add) just because they're convicted of a drug crime and not a violent crime doesn't automatically equate to them NOT being a violent criminal.

Many drug criminals are quite violent, though it may not be listed in their conviction.

True, but consider this....they may have established a record of violence while in prison, and that would count. Either way, we cannot lock people up for what they might have done, without charges and due process, because the Constitution clearly forbids it. I agree with your concerns on a gut level, and there is no doubt that these people are at least secondarily responsible for other crimes....whether or not they committed them themselves. All I can say is that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. Jesus once said that the poor will always be with us, no matter what we do about it. You could paraphrase that and say that criminals will always be with us, no matter what we do about it. The only effect we can have on criminality is to marginally nudge the percentages one way or the other through social policies. But those social policies have their own implications, separate from the original intent, like the ripples from a rock thrown into a pond......and those ripples are not always positive effects.

Consider just ONE unintended consequence of the War on Drugs (WOD) in recent memory: Operation Fast & Furious (F&F). Doesn't matter whether the intent behind F&F was to target cartels or to secretly crush gun rights in the U.S.; the net effect was that hundreds of Mexican nationals were murdered with guns that the U.S. government provided illegally to the cartels (and certainly that was NOT an intended effect); AND, whether the intent was there or not, the (predictable) results caused another drum-beat in the media for more gun control. Regardless of the intent of the F&F planners and executors, there can be no doubt that without the WOD, there would be no F&F, and there would be one less assault on the 2nd Amendment.

This is relevant to the topic of this thread because a large number of those to be released were imprisoned as a result of the WOD. Please understand that on an emotional level, I want to lock them all up and throw away the key. Drugs affected my life, and the lives of people whom I love. I praise God that he brought me to the point many years ago where I could distance myself both from their use, and from the companionship of others who were on that downward spiral.

On some moral level, I maintain that drug use is wrong....in the same way that drunkenness is wrong.....whether or not alcohol is legal and drugs are for the most part and in most places not legal. It is interesting to observe the evolvement of events in Colorado, after that state legalized marijuana. Those who sold the legislation promised TWO things would come out of it:

1. They promised that the state would generate huge tax revenues through the legalization and controlled sale of marijuana.
2. They promised that the legalized sale, possession, and consumption of marijuana in Colorado would drive the cartels out of business.

Here is what has actually happened:

1. The state is charging a huge tax (I believe it is 38%) on the sale of marijuana, so people are driven by the tax policy to buy it on the black market.
2. Because people are driven to buy it on the black market, the state is now in competition with the cartels, and the state is NOT delivering on the promise of huge tax revenues because it is now cheaper to buy pot on the street than from a storefront vendor.
3. The cartels are nothing if not smart, and by undercutting the state taxed price, they have a distinct market advantage over the state.
4. Because the sale of marijuana is still a federal crime, none of the major banking institutions are willing to process marijuana sale transactions, either through credit card/merchant processing accounts, or through written bank checks. Therefore, ALL the marijuana transactions in Colorado are cash transactions.
5. Since they are cash transactions, vendors have no reason other than their individual integrity to report all the sales as revenue on a balance sheet. That equates to fewer taxes collected and paid.
6. There is no state mandated quality control OR state mandated regulation over the form in which the product is delivered (i.e., smokable weed, versus cookies/brownies). Because of this, there is no guarantee of how strong or weak the product sold is. Just the other day, a Colorado high school student died because he ingested an entire marijuana cookie which was supposed to be divided into 6 adult portions. (We can argue all day long about whether or not this was a darwinian result of stupidity, the fact remains that a kid died, not a mature adult with presumably enough wisdom to absorb the consequences of his folly.)
7. Buyers are only nominally required to buy from approved vendors, who presumably collect all the taxes and keep everything above board, but there is no punishment for being in possession of pot or for using it. So as long as a buyer is willing to take the fairly minor risk of buying on the black market, there is no way to enforce the law without some kind of draconian crackdown on personal liberty.
8. And lastly, residents of the other states where pot is NOT legal are going to Colorado to buy their weed, legally, for illegal use and/or distribution in their home states.

And this is just marijuana I'm talking about. The issues become exponentially more complex for the more potent and dangerous drugs. But one thing is for certain: in the 43 years since president Nixon formally declared a "war on drugs" (and thereby committed the term into the colloquial american idiom and lexicon), the program has been a MASSIVE failure. Drug use is as bad or worse now than when the WOD began. We have spent an estimated $1.78 TRILLION in taxpayer dollars on the WOD over the past 43 years. What better things could have been accomplished with all that money? You want to blow your own mind? Try and figure out your personal share of that $1.78 trillion over the last 43 years, and then ask yourself if you got value for your money.

The WOD is a total failure. I used to be very much for it, but the numbers don't lie. There HAS to be a better way, and this is very much at the heart of how we deal with the release of 200,000 convicts. Prison doesn't seem to be a deterrent. Heck, with a little ingenuity and a willingness to bargain away some of their personal independence from other prisoners, they can even get their drugs IN prison. Our gut response may be to call for more draconian measures, but the reality of it is that these measures have had little or no effect in the elimination of the illegal drug trade. For each one we convict and lock up, 20 more take their places. Conversely, Colorado has proven to us that a state-controlled and taxed system doesn't work either. I remember people buying smuggled cigarettes on the black market in the 1970s when I lived in New York City, because smugglers brought them from out of state into the city by the truckload in order to avoid having to pay the taxes. People still smuggle liquor, and the hills are still full of moonshiners. History has shown repeatedly that wherever citizens can obtain a controlled product for less on the black market, many will do so. When that happens, the vaunted tax revenues everyone expected dry up or are measurably diminished, and a whole new class of criminals is created by legislative fiat.

It wasn't the British tea imports that the colonists objected to, it was the addition of a British tax on that tea, in order to support the crown—a disembodied centralized government thousands of miles away, in which the average joe had very little say and from which he felt generally disconnected. Sound familiar? It isn't the taxability or the criminality that is at issue, it is the fact that it is controlled at all.

What will happen to our liberties when the federal government mandates that all FTF gun transactions must be conducted through an FFL? Then what will happen when they stop granting FFLs to sellers? It is easy to focus on those 200,000 criminals alone and their drug-related offenses, but in so doing, we risk losing sight of the other ripples on the pond. As a category, "Non-violent" crime only exists because the act of buying and selling a controlled substance on the black market has been deemed to be criminal. This is no different than when the British decided to tax our tea. And, when they taxed the colonists' tea, the colonists were willing to do violence over it. You can't get rid of criminality because it is a part of human nature among a certain percentage of the population. Like I said, criminals will always be with us, the way the poor will always be with us, and no matter what we do. But if you decriminalize the sale/purchase/use of a substance, then at least the only criminality that remains is those who will not/cannot work because of their addiction, and will therefore commit crimes in order to be able to afford their addiction. But just as with gun control, when we argue (CORRECTLY) that criminals will ignore gun laws and that such laws really only target the non-criminally minded, drug control laws will always be ignored by criminals, and in the end such laws serve only to control the non-criminally minded. A certain number of people are ALWAYS going to be locked up for burglary, etc., because they will ALWAYS do whatever they have to do to pay for their drugs. Those are the real criminals, and they are with us regardless of the legalities of or controls over drugs. But for an awful lot of otherwise productive and non-criminally minded people, there is no sense in throwing them in jail if you can eliminate worse criminals from the supply system. The only way to do that is to not only decriminalize the sale/possession/use of drugs, but also to eliminate the arbitrary controls over such things. Of course, as long as governments claim the authority to control behavior, there will be people who will resist that control, and there will be people whose lives prove out social darwinism.

It seems to me that the better solution is to empower citizens to protect themselves and their property, by force of violence if necessary. Instead of trying to socially stigmatize drug use through the public schools and by means of harsh corrective measures, start removing the stigma surrounding guns in the public schools. Start teaching students about their property rights, and their rights to defend their property...of which their very life is a part. START taking school kids on field trips to skid row with a "this is what will happen to you if you get hooked on drugs" lesson. STOP dragging people before a grand jury for shooting a junky who invaded their home at night. In other words, leave people alone to do for themselves. START requiring drug testing for anyone who receives any kind of state aid, at any level, and take away that aid unless the individual can prove that the substance found in their urine is prescribed by their doctor, and being prescribed and used at a level consistent with good practice. The way to get people to stop taking drugs ISN'T to keep enabling them to do so with minimized consequences; it is to remove any support they get from society so that one of two things happen: 1) it gets SO hard to be a drug abuser that they quit on their own; or 2) they never quit and they either die of their addiction, or at the hands of a citizen legitimately defending himself or his property.

"Labor farms" and other such draconian solutions won't work. They've been tried before. What will work is the total casting out from society of those individuals who travel down that road. Of those, some will make the decision to seek help through non-profit 12-step programs. They will be the "prodigal sons" and they will be reconciled with society and re-enter it as productive participants. Some will never make that choice, and they will suffer all of the consequences of their decisions. Personal co-dependency can wreck the lives of those who try to co-dependently support (or co-dependently punish) an addict in his or her addiction. Societal co-dependency will wreck the society that tries to co-dependently support/punish its addicts in their addictions.

All the prisons in the world have not made this a safer society. It is time to start empowering people to make themselves safer, and to start allowing drug users to experience the full consequences of their addictions without a social support system. THAT has yet to be tried, but I believe that it would be far more successful in the long run than anything we've tried to date.

[Abraham]

O.K., here's a few random thoughts:

The "Scared Straight" idea might work for some, but I wouldn't get my hopes up.

For it to work, you can't be a sociopath or psychopath. The criminals in these categories can't be made to see reason. Many of our dear convicts fall into one of these categories.

Plus, I'd like to see all drug laws totally decriminalized.

Want to be a self destructive drug addict? By all means, hit the drug buffet until you kill yourself. The world will be a better place without you.

If caught driving or in some critical job and found high, at the very least you lose your job or perhaps even go to prison (we're not going to completely get away from druggies there) depending on the criticality of your job, or if the offense is egregious enough, public hanging. Akin to the way the Chinese treat their offenders.

Immediately after the drug laws are decriminalized, they'll be an uptick in drug related problems, but as the self destructive kill themselves off, it'll diminish markedly.

Sound harsh? Yes. It's a tough world.

I agree with mandatory drug testing for those receiving government aid. If drugs tests are failed - no mo moola from Uncle Sugar for you.