I believe that I have a unique set of credentials for speaking as an authority on the subject of "prison reform". As a prison inmate, I once forced a 30 foot cross to be removed from the roof of a nondenominational prison chapel. As retaliation, the warden had me "four pointed" by the prison SORT squad over a "food strike" I had nothing to do with, and transfered to a much higher security level "institution". Ultimately, some eight years into my resulting lawsuit against the feds, and five years after my release, I accepted a $5,000 check, and finally let the whole matter drop.
I know whereof I speak.
We're killing ourselves, our society, with our wrongheaded drug war in ways that the average person has no concept of. Some people truly do need to be kept locked up, but most on the inside shouldn't even be there. Trying to sort through the mess is impossible, though, as long as we maintain a drug war incubated counterculture active inside the greater society. We've got many millions of our neighbors who aren't part of the mainstream, and don't want to be part of the mainstream because the mainstream wants to lock them in prison (and in millions of cases has already done so) for things that should be among our legitimate lifestyle choices. These folks have far more in common with the mainstream than they do with an outlaw gangster or a sociopathic serial killer, but the greater society insists on delivering exactly the opposite message. And in all too many instances the message sinks in. Sadly we can continue to incarcerate outselves only at our own peril.
Talk about creating the perfect environment for truly dangerous, destructive animals to find cover, and all too often even support, in. These human crime waves are not accepted because they are sympathized with, but only because they just happen to be swimming in the same stream as so many others of us. But the outcome is exactly the same either way. “If they look like me, hell, who am I to judge? Let’s get high together, and you do your thing and I’ll do mine.”
Legalize it all, and we would get rid of a huge support system that acts as camouflage for god only knows what. Then not only would the prison overcrowding problem be solved overnight, but we could even begin the process of using our prisons to actually make society safer.