A number of statistics have been brought forward lately which tie into the ongoing discussion on how the current administration has cut away our rights and focused on meaningless foibles instead of real crimes.
Start with this from the AP:
WASHINGTON (AP) A record 7 million people - or one in every 32 American adults - were behind bars, on probation or on parole by the end of last year, according to the Justice Department. Of those, 2.2 million were in prison or jail, an increase of 2.7 percent over the previous year, according to a report released Wednesday.
More than 4.1 million people were on probation and 784,208 were on parole at the end of 2005. Prison releases are increasing, but admissions are increasing more.
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"Today's figures fail to capture incarceration's impact on the thousands of children left behind by mothers in prison," Marc Mauer, the executive director of the Sentencing Project, a Washington-based group supporting criminal justice reform, said in a statement. "Misguided policies that create harsher sentences for nonviolent drug offenses are disproportionately responsible for the increasing rates of women in prisons and jails."
Now tie into this information that from 1995 to 2003, inmates in federal prison for drug offenses have accounted for 49 percent of total prison population growth. While that is not broken down by who's in jail for what exactly but 780,000 marijuana arrests in 2005 means it's a safe bet that a lot of that 49% is due to cannabis laws. That three-quarters of a million people they arrested in 2005 represents more law enforcement time and effort and resources (money) being expended on pot smokers than all violent crimes combined.
Now we should consider the following (and I picked this up from Andrew Sullivan's Blog at Time Magazine): Many of these arrests are of people who need the Mary Jane for medical purposes. And medical science has proven that the use of cannabis to ease pain and keep people with Parkinsons and similar diseases in control of themselves (check out the video at the Sullivan blog)is not harmfubutbu helpful and inexpensive.
Pot has not been shown anywhere to hurt people's health (not even lung cancer, which you would think it could cause... nope... doesn't), yet captured smokers are treated like terrorists (while we allow alcoholics to drink themselves to death with regularity). I, myself, am a diabetic, and NORML has shown, among other health benefits, how cannabis cab be used to treat high blood sugar.
We have been pursuing pot as criminal since the 1930s when it was tied in with the suppression of alcohol. When prohibition ended, marijuana wasn't restored to popular legality like liquor.
Think of how we can reduce the cost of prison maintenance. Think how we could focus on murderers and rapists.
Why are we so stupid?
Under The LobsterScope