rehabilitation instead of prison…
Edit:
How about if I’m not bothering anybody then don’t even arrest me?
I misunderstood that comment above. My bad.
What do you mean? People get arrested for possession of weed for example that they plan to consume by themselves, not bothering anybody. Then they get locked up. You rather lock them away, than try to rehabilitate them? This applies to so many cases. Of course there are cases where the verdict says prison but at least try to keep people out of prison. But wait the prison system is a corporation trying to make money.
Uh did you misread it? That’s exactly his point, people getting arrested when they weren’t even bothering anyone.
Just gonna leave this PDF of Angela Davis’ Are Prisons Obsolete? here.
And not only is the first part necessarily the worst, but once you’re in the system they make it hard to get back out by throwing all sorts of arbitrary requirements on you to fulfill, with little to no flexibility. 10-week class that occurs right in the middle of your work-day? Fuck you. It all serves to essentially keep you in the system as it keeps on fucking with your life. Not to mention prison/jail, which brands you with a permanent scarlet letter that bars you from even working at many jobs even after you’ve gotten out.
Same thing with having one of those breathalyzer things on your car. You have to pay to have it installed, pay a monthly fee in addition to all the other shit you’ve already paid for. And then you can only go a very few certain places. Makes it incredibly difficult to recover from that. It’s not to punish you or keep you off the road after a DUI, it’s so they can extract more money from you
They don’t arbitrarily hand those things out… Don’t drink and drive and it’s not a problem.
I’ve unfortunately had the pleasure of needing one of these interlock devices installed on my car back in 2010. It’s definitely been awhile but the device only limits where you could go if you had alcohol in your system, and that limit would be NOWHERE. If you were sober you just had to blow clean every 5-20 minutes and I could drive as much as I pleased. The option without the device was no driving except to and from work and maybe the grocery store 1-2 times a week.
I’ve never heard of this, but I’m sure there’s some jurisdiction that would probably limit you to only going to work or something if you have one
And then they charge you hundreds to thousands of dollars for those classes so that once you do find a job, they just garnish your wages.
They charge you for drug tests and “renting” ankle monitors, and if you don’t pay they just throw you back in jail. Which sometimes has its own fees. Even public defenders can have fees depending on your state/county, and they will threaten to take you to small claims court over the $50 they billed you without telling you. For counsel that literally exists to represent poor people. Ask me how I know.
The logic is deterrence.
I mean it’s stupid, but that’s what the supporters think.
The thing they are missing is that no one commits a crime thinking they will get caught. So ever increasing the deterrence doesn’t help.
Drugs is a public health issue, no really criminal. Prohibition doesn’t work with things done at scales like drugs and alcohol. You’re just feeding the criminal gangs.
It’s not deterrence, that’s not the point. Deterrence does not work.
It’s about sending people to prison so they can do cheap labor. It’s also about racism because it’s disproportionately targeted towards minorities. It absolutely makes sense in that light.
I’m sure that is the motivation of some, those involved, but the vast majority will be voters who think deterrence works.
It’s the prison-industrial complex paying the politicians to push this stuff through. Voters don’t matter to the politics being pushed, they just get told later that they wanted them.
The logic is it also ruins other peoples lives. No one exists in society in a nut shell or as an island. If your choice to use drugs would expose, entice, or otherwise encourage a person to use drugs then it is reasonable in my opinion for the state to protect people from it.
That being said clearly our approach isn’t working. There shouldn’t be laissez-faire drug use all over but there shouldn’t be life in prison immediately consequences either.
The most succesful drug rehabilitation programs are mandatory rehab facilities that are a choice alternate to going to jail for an equal amount of time.
Also housing first models are incredibly effective. But… the entire western world uses housing as an investment vehicle and commodity so it is diametrically opposed to housing first initiatives. If the average citizen is paying 50% of their income for housing and then “junkies” get given free housing the political party that implemented it would be booted so fast.
That’s because it’s not logic - it’s propaganda. The war on drugs was always built on a solid bedrock of oppressing minorities, black people in particular.
It’s perfectly circular, like this man’s dome.
Don’t forget that drug laws are often racist e.g. cocaine possession carries a lesser punishment than crack, cannabis is a schedule 1 substance, etc. This goes some way to explaining the legal rationale.
How is this racist? I don’t doubt that you’re right but I’m not understanding what makes that racist. Are black people significantly more likely to have crack than cocaine or something? At first glance it seems logical to me that cocaine has less of a punishment than crack, but that’s based off of a somewhat limited understanding of the effects of the two drugs.
Crack and cocaine are the same drug! From https://americanaddictioncenters.org/cocaine-treatment/differences-with-crack: “Pharmacologically, cocaine and crack are the same substance.”
They are the same pharmacologically, but the effects between snorting and smoking vary greatly.
Regular cocaine powder is cocaine hydrochloride. Crack is made by mixing cocaine hydrochloride with ammonia and then burning off the hydrochloride which makes it a freebase. People don’t smoke regular cocaine until it has been turned into freebase. Smoking cocaine powder is just wasteful compared to snorting it.
Smoking crack results in a more rapid absorption into the bloodstream—compared to snorting the powder. Therefore, the effects are more rapid and quicker to dissipate than if someone just snorted cocaine.
Crack is cheaper than powder cocaine, because crack has less cocaine per dose, and is still very potent. So poorer areas get flooded with crack, as no one can afford to be addicted to cocaine powder in the lower class.
So, in conclusion, it is absolutely discriminatory to have harsher punishment for crack than cocaine. Even if crack is more potent, it has less illegal substance in it by weight than cocaine powder does.
The racist associations between crack and black people are rumored to actually be an intentional thing. The US government says the allegations have no merit, but the CIA has been accused of funneling large amounts of crack cocaine into the black neighborhoods of LA. Here’s one article about it on a .gov but you can find many other sources on google: THE CIA-CONTRA-CRACK COCAINE CONTROVERSY Relevant quote from the original source accusing them:
For the better part of a decade, a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, a Mercury News investigation has found.
This drug network opened the first pipeline between Colombia’s cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a city now known as the “crack” capital of the world. The cocaine that flooded in helped spark a crack explosion in urban America . . . and provided the cash and connections needed for L.A.'s gangs to buy automatic weapons.
