MediumTex wrote:
brick-house wrote:
Our current policy has created an efficient black market free of taxes and regulations that (as you would expect of an unregulated and untaxed industry) delivers drugs in a highly effective manner. Only price to pay is a criminal one, which is unfortunately paid by the poor and minorities. Meanwhile, the taxpayers fund a never-ending war that feeds the prison, military, and law enforcement industries.
These industries (prison, law enforcement, and military) are government entities. Republican propagandists regularly argue that government entities are corrupt and inefficient. They also argue that government entities once created will not die, but instead look to justify and grow their existence. When you state that the drug war is administered by ever growing government agencies, the government is bad attitude changes. Talk about Reefer Madness. Back to my legal and expensive Victory HopDevil beer. So it goes...
Earlier in my legal career I did a bit of criminal defense work, and what is striking is how completely everyone in the system accepts the idea that our whole approach to criminal justice is really just a "catch and release" system.
The police pick up a "bad guy", process him, let him go, and then wait to encounter him again and repeat the process. Each time the bad guy moves through the system, various parties (bail bondsmen, lawyers, court clerks, probaton officers, etc.) take a cut of the person's normally already small amount of money, thus ensuring that the guy who was poor to start with will be even poorer at the end of the process, and thus more tempted than ever to turn to crime as a way of meeting his material needs.
There are the occasional people who only move through the system once, but it's unusual. What is far more common is that the criminal justice system will make a "customer for life" with many first offenders.
It's also surprising how self-righteous prosecutors can be when they are in front of the TV cameras, but the rest of the time they treat criminal offenses the same way a business person would treat widgets; they're just a commodity used to provide job security to the police, judges, jailers, etc.
I used to see prosecutors make probation deals constantly that they knew couldn't possibly be fulfilled in most cases. Thus, the 18 year old who received 10 years probation would find himself over the next ten years in and out of jail for a variety of minor probation violations, even assuming that no more crimes were committed during that 10 year period. Over that ten year period, you will typically see a very significant percentage of the probationer's earnings turned over to the state or his attorneys as part of the probation process.
It's really sad, because a lot of the people who enter the system could successfully exit it at some point with a little constructive effort to help them get their lives straight, but that idea would be about as foreign to the average member of the criminal justice apparatus as it would be to ask a fisherman if he would be interested in removing some of the fish from his favorite fishing spot. This observation is really not as cycnical as it sounds; rather, it's just rational economic actors pursing their own self-interest within a flawed system.
