Now HERE'S a "Quagmire"

Here’s a lil something that should really embarrass us as a nation, instead of, let’s say, being embarrassed about certain political leaders and their foreign policy:

WASHINGTON - 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.

[…]

"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."

From 1995 to 2003, inmates in federal prison for drug offenses have accounted for 49 percent of total prison population growth.

“Misguided policies… (concerning)… non-violent drug offenses” and more specifically, the “War on Drugs” that spawned them are hot buttons with me. The “WoD” is perhaps my biggest hot button and is just one example of where traditional conservatives and I part company.

The “War on Drugs” is, has been, and will always be, a miserable failure by any objective standard. Assuming, of course, “objective standard” means stopping the flow of illegal drugs into the country or reducing the number of people, in relative or absolute terms, that use said illegal drugs. The only beneficiaries of the War on Drugs are the bureaucrats and minions of the various government entities (DEA, FBI, and their state and local equivalents) charged with enforcing our bizarre drug policies. The DEA alone employs 10,891 people and will consume $2.4 billion dollars of our tax money this year. The DEA’s growth rate is astounding, as well…up from 2,775 employees and a budget of “only” $65.2 million in 1972. That’s a lot of damned money down a rat-hole, ain’t it? Or, to look at it another way, $2.4 billion dollars would buy a lot of F-22s.

It took the United States 13 years, in the case of alcohol, to realize it is futile to legislate morality when it comes to prohibiting what reasonable and responsible people ingest. People are going to eat, drink, or smoke whatever they want, the law be damned. That was true during Prohibition and it’s true today. And the national crime rate soared during Prohibition. Sound familiar?

I’ve long been in favor of the so-called “Dutch Model.” I’ve seen it and I believe the Dutch policy works, regardless of objections to the contrary found at the Wiki link I’ve given. Yet the American public, and a large percentage of the EU, as well, continue to reject what the Dutch have effectively lived with for years. Deep down inside I think the majority of the American public thinks it’s just OK to persecute “them.” We need someone to kick around, right?

You can find…if you’re interested…additional arguments on drug prohibition, pro and con, here.