Just How Much The War On Drugs Impacts Our Overcrowded Prisons, In One Chart

reply to post by benrl


Of course, how much you want to bet that the majority of that 758 in that list of crimes is in it for counterfeiting? The government only allows OFFICIAL state sanctioned counterfeiters.

reply to post by Wrabbit2000


Mandatory minimums are the schools no tolerance policies of the adult world,

They are absurd, in so many cases legally we take CIRCUMSTANCE as a major sentencing and culpability factor, BUT NOT IN THIS ONE EXAMPLE.

Its insane, and its lobbied by the FOR profit prisons,


How long are we the Citizens going to tolerate things that go directly against the public interest?

Is the government FOR the people, By the people? Or is it For the Corporate By the corporate?

I can't tell anymore.

reply to post by benrl

America's prisons are dangerously overcrowded, and the war on drugs is mainly to blame

Is the war on drugs to blame or is it just WASP authoritarians doing business as usual?

Inmates == corporate profit

More profit more CEO bonuses etc. As you might imagine, certain segments of the population get locked up more frequently and for longer periods.

Racial make up of the inmate population

It's all working out for the oppressors. What could be better?

It get's better! Inmates used for below market labor.

I have to say... It's a lock.

reply to post by InverseLookingGlass


It certainly seems to be an exploitative system we have managed to work out, somehow corporations in america have managed to create a new slave class in the prison systems.

Not even taking account the racial make up to start with, this is a human issue, not a racial one.

If we can change the law none of this would be a problem.

reply to post by InverseLookingGlass


WOW.... You're absolutely right and I hadn't known this part....

Tennier lost the deal not to a private sector competitor, but to a corporation owned by the federal government, Federal Prison Industries.

Federal Prison Industries, also known as Unicor, does not have to worry much about its overhead. It uses prisoners for labor, paying them 23 cents to $1.15 an hour. Although the company is not allowed to sell to the private sector, the law generally requires federal agencies to buy its products, even if they are not the cheapest.

Source

I wonder what that last part is supposed to mean. If they can't make the cheapest product for competition with slave labor rates, the people signing the paychecks need to trade places with the inmates getting them at pennies per hour.

Indeed.. I can see one heck of a profit potential and outright abuse in the federal prisons when not being competitive at even THAT advantage is such an issue it's even worth mention.

reply to post by Wrabbit2000


Wrabbit, add to that this

Prison quotas derail reform

States have agreed to contracts where they guarantee inmate counts with penalties if not meet...


Its insanity, land of the free indeed.

BTW, my PDF link for Fed mandatories on the last page loads a little oddly. It's nothing bad, and actually good how they locked upper and lower margins for PDF viewing with it, but odd...so it may not load for everyone. I took a couple sreenshots from the document to show how it relates and matters to this topic, directly.



Nice enhancement there if you have only one other kind of non-violent. Why not crimes against children like porn? Why THAT non-violent to add as the single noted enhancement outside violence for the Federal 3 strike law?

Not as bad as the next though, and more can be seen in the original.



Nice folks, eh? Wow...and this is supposed to be a Government made up of the people, huh? Something got lost in there on the way to Washington, I think.

Maybe we need to start paying police and prosecutors, as well as attorneys general, in accordance with the difficulty of making an arrest and successful prosecution of certain types of crimes. It is probably fairly easy to bust someone new daily for smoking something they're not supposed to, or dealing it, but taking down a CEO of Bear Sterns or Goldman Sachs is fraught with difficulties and far more personal danger, since those guys have unlimited funds to spend on both lawyers and personal hitmen...

This chart could easily be used to decide which crime is most likely to 'pay' for the least amount of risk.

(By the way, the only reason Bernie Madoff went to jail rather than use lawyers to stay out indefinitely was because he knew if he was on the outside, he was a dead man.)

reply to post by benrl


Drug laws are inherently unconstitutional and this bs "war on drugs" was just another excuse for government to expand and increase its interference in everyones day to day life.

The government has no Constitutional authority to dictate what people may or may not put into their own bodies.

It took a laughable Constitutional amendment to ban alcohol, yet these corrupt jackasses decided people should just automatically go to prison for putting a different substance in their bodies.

The entire justice system needs to be abolished and a new, fresh start is desperately needed.

reply to post by signalfire


Monetary Incentives certainly drive behavior, but is that not the root of this problem to begin with?

Id rather address the real problem than bribe someone to do their job properly.

reply to post by benrl


When talking of the overcrowding of prisons I feel that asset forfeiture is part of the problem as well as being a problem of its own.

Although state laws regarding asset forfeiture vary, thanks to the practice known as “equitable sharing” local and state police keep up to 80 percent of the profits from selling off the property they seize from criminals, as long as federal law enforcement is involved in the case, however tangentially. And in civil forfeiture cases, like that of Caswell, the owner of the property’s guilt is not the issue debated—if the property was used for crimes, it can be seized. The Justice Department’s asset forfeiture fund was at $1.8 billion in 2011, and it gave away nearly half a billion dollars to local police departments. If the law changed, a lot of that money would disappear, and we all know how much government agencies cling to money. With rewards like that, who wouldn’t prioritize drug crime, when that’s the only kind of investigation that will bring in new patrol cars and help maintain expensive SWAT teams

source

But we need the war on drugs to keep our for profit prisons full. You know you have a problem when you expect to make money from people going to prison.

reply to post by AlaskanDad


Certainly a cash cow all around.

reply to post by InverseLookingGlass


You're dead on. Corrections spending is the second fastest growing sector in states' budgets, only behind Medicaid. Corrections Corp of America and others like it make huge money, and could seriously get fleeced if certain laws change. $32,286 is the amount spent, on average, per inmate for one year. Only $10,600 is spent per year on pupils. Disgraceful.

Link

The laws against some weeds are there because they are a powerful DEPROGRAMMING tool..........

reply to post by benrl


In Washington, there is a legalization effort that comes with comprehensive reform - I think it is a good path to follow.

Around here, we think of neighboring Idaho as a scary place, it has legislated the opposite intention, in fact, to never allow for decriminalization procedures. However, is it a coincidence that Idaho has a corrupt prison system ran by corporations, one of the most corrupt in the U.S.?

I would stay away from drugs if they have the ability to put you in prison and get you court charges as well as other charges (in Idaho, they force you to pay for time in jail and the like) that could make it impossible to survive in an already damning economy.

The prison system is really close to being similar to the debtor's prisons of the past, with no clear way out. It isn't like the past, where getting a drug charge was recoverable, even the most minor charge could lose you your job and living space in the current economy.

Not only that - places in Washington State have been under investigation by the ACLU for their court costs and legal fees being unfair - the complaint is that they put people in a situation where they are not able to pay them back - and this can even result in more jail time, and more fees.

I have personally seen situations like this rise up for even the most minor (legitimately minor) infractions - situations where people's entire lives have been ruined for such minor things because the economy is so bad that any extra strain can put people over the top.

For example, if I got a speeding ticket right now, I don't think I would be able to recover from it.

buster2010
But we need the war on drugs to keep our for profit prisons full. You know you have a problem when you expect to make money from people going to prison.

Buster is absolutely right, and with the bad economy, hopefully this doesn't creep up to too much of the U.S. population having experienced prison time.

Says Land of the Free,

But has the highest prison population in the world.


Irony be thy name.

Not only does it overcrowd the prisons, it overcrowds all the other aspects of the penal system. Dockets are filled with drug cases. Parole and probation officers get overworked and people that truly need to be watched get overlooked.

But off course we cannot take away a corporations right to make money. If we legalize any drugs, we are penalizing hard working corporations that have lucrative contracts with prisons, their public money and 25¢ a day labor! We can't do that that is wrong and unethical.

reply to post by benrl


Part of the problem is privatized prisons which have a financial interest in prisoner levels. They make money when they have prisoner commodities. THIS MUST STOP NOW!

reply to post by th3dudeabides


Yes, as I said ealier it is a major problem, wrote a thread on it awhile back.

Prison quota reform