It is ridiculous in the Land of the Free, that we have this much of a spike in the number of people we have incarcerated, for whatever reason. Did human nature in this country all of a sudden change that significantly when this huge spike occurred?
CARPE DIEM: Thanks to War on Drugs, U.S. is World's #1 Jailer:
"But none of them even come close to the incarceration rate of the World's #1 Jailer - the United States, largely because of the 'War on Drugs' war against peaceful Americans using intoxicants currently not approved of by the U.S. government (see chart below).
Note that in the full list of countries, neighboring Canada ranks #124 (117 prisoners per 100,000), and countries with liberalized drug laws like Portugal rank #128 (112 per 100,000) and Netherlands ranks #145 (94 per 100,000).
Update: AIG claims that 'There is ZERO evidence that this greater number of prisoners in the U.S. is due to the war on drugs.' Here is some evidence:"
1. "A major cause of such high numbers of prisoners in the United States system is that it has much longer sentences than any other part of the world. The typical mandatory sentence for a first-time drug offense in federal court is five or ten years, compared to other developed countries around the world where a first time offense would warrant at most 6 months in jail. Mandatory sentencing prohibits judges from using their discretion and forces them to place longer sentences on nonviolent offenses than they normally would have."
2. "One of the biggest contributors to the United States' spike is the war on drugs. Around 1980, the United States had 40,000 people in prison for drug crimes. After the passage of Reagan's Anti-Drug Abuse Act in 1986, incarceration for non-violent offenses dramatically increased. Part of the legislation included the implementation of mandatory minimum sentences for "the distribution of cocaine, including far more severe punishment for distribution of crack—associated with blacks—than powder cocaine, associated with whites."
Under the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, users of powder cocaine can possess up to 100 times more substance than users of crack, while facing the same mandatory sentence. The Anti-Drug Act targeted low-level street dealers, which had a disproportionate effect on poor blacks, Latinos, the young, and women.
The United States houses over 500,000 prisoners for these crimes. Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance said, "We now imprison more people for drug law violations than all of Western Europe (with a much larger population) incarcerates for all offenses."
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It's a rare day when I will be in agreement with former President Jimmy Carter, so we may as well celebrate the moment.
Call Off the Global Drug War
By JIMMY CARTER
Published: June 16, 2011
From the New Yoprk Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/17/opinion/17carter.html?_r=2
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And just to show that politics does make for strange bedfellows, Ron Paul and Barney Frank are reaching across the aisle to push for some measure of a cease fire in the War on Drugs.
Lawmakers to introduce bill to legalize marijuana - Yahoo! News:
"The bill, which is expected to be introduced on Thursday by Republican Representative Ron Paul and Democratic Representative Barney Frank, would be the first ever legislation designed to end the federal ban on marijuana."
Three weeks ago a group of ex-presidents of Latin America as well as former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan denounced the failure of the global war on drugs and called for urgent changes, including the legalization of cannabis.
Between 1998 and 2008, worldwide consumption of opiates increased 35 percent, with cocaine use growing 27 percent and marijuana use growing 8.5 percent, according to the Global Commission on Drug Policy.
June marks the 40th anniversary of the "War on Drugs" launched by President Richard Nixon in 1970, the first major US anti-drug initiative.
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