Mexico Legalizes Personal Possession of MJ, coke, meth, LSD etc.

Bobrek, you missed the point completely. DWI IS a crime because of what you might do. It is a precrime as redchocolate puts it. Before it was made into a criminal offense, consuming alcohol and driving home while hurting nobody, you had done nothing wrong. But because people have done wrong in the past under these circumstances, now the act of drinking and driving is a crime. They punish you for the act now, because a law was put in to prevent you from having the chance to commit the actual damage.

A precrime as redchocolate calls it could pertain to anything from speeding, running a red light, wearing a seatbelt, walking into a bank with a gun, DWI, jaywalking, and about 90% of the other laws. The first day of the police academy, they tell you most Laws are put in to protect people from their own stupidity. So if you think about it like that, wouldn't most laws be made for precrime?

 

DWI is not a crime because of what you might do. It is a crime because of the likelihood that it will happen.

Roughly 40% of all auto fatalities have alcohol as a component. Therefore, you are much more likely to be in an accident that causes a fatality if you have been consuming alcohol. Generally it is not the drunk that is killed.

The statistics are such that we, as a society, believe that driving while intoxicated just is not acceptable.

 

Nobody seems to be able to grasp this concept. People drive drunk daily. A very high percentage hurt nobody. This law was put into effect, because statistically speaking you are more likely to have an accident. Therefore, this is law put into place to prevent you from having a higher chance at an accident. Therefore, it is a law preventing you from what might happen. If you drive drunk, you are not guaranteed to have a wreck. Therefore, it is a law made for what you might do. No matter how you spin it, this is a fact. I am not dending DWI. I am saying it is a precrime as redchocolate puts it. If you run a slow redlight with not another car on the road, you have hurt nobody, yet this is still a crime. It is a law also made to prevent you from what might happen. Most all laws are made to prevent you from what might happen. Again this is a fact. It is not debatable.
My point was that he said that it is a precrime to prevent him from having drugs around his children, because if a child got a hold of his drugs that is when they should deal with it, not before. I was simply pointing out that all laws were set up this way and used DWI as an example. You could just about pick any law out of the lawbook and use as an example. If there are drugs in your house, there is a much higher chance that your kids will get ahold of them. Thats why laws are put in place to prevent this from happenning in advance.

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8221599.stm

Argentina rules on mar1juana use

The supreme court in Argentina has ruled that it is unconstitutional to punish people for using mar1juana for personal consumption.

 

In the privately run, for-profit prison industry, inmates do work all day, perhaps not in "slave conditions," but for literally pennies per day.

It is a monetary drain on the STATE, but not on the corporations who run prisons for profit. The corporations have at least a $30K per year incentive for each and every prisoner, plus the profits they can make from the inmates doing whatever jobs they are doing.

I suggest you do some research on the privatized prison industry, those guys are lobbying hard all day, every day to not only keep drugs illegal, but to make the penalties harsher.

 

I highly recommend reading up on the Swiss prescription heroin trials they have had going for over a decade now.

 

I feel the same way about the same drug. Personally, I know that I could get cocaine at any time if I truly put my mind to it, but given my experience, I wouldn't use it even if it were available at Stop-N-Go. I am able to avoid buying cigarettes there, I could easily avoid cocaine even if it were ubiquitous.

 

Again, we are talking about whether there SHOULD be drug laws, not whether we do.

 

There are 150,000 prisoners in the TDCJ system and 14,000 total beds in private facilities. So less than 10% of Texas prisoners are housed publicly, and the public incentives are very much on limiting incarceration and early release of prisoners already incarcerated, regardless of the influence of the private facilities who house a small percentage of our inmates... perhaps you should do some more research on the industry, and on the makeup of Texas (and nationwide) prisons in the aggregate.

 

When you drive on the roads (owned by the state, basically), you do not have the same rights that you do in your home (YOUR private property). Just like when you go into a school, you cannot possess a firearm, even though you have the right to bear arms under normal circumstances. That is why DWIs are illegal, because you are in violation of reasonable laws that pertain to someone else's property.

 

What happens when we break 'laws' that fundamentally violate our Constitutional rights? The problem I have with American democracy is that it caters to the elite, and the 95% of people who have only a rudimentary understanding of their rights and how to protect them, while the informed 5% get the shaft. For example, when an Amish community has their doors busted down by the Feds and are held at gunpoint because they sold raw milk to their neighbors, then I have a big problem with the 'fairness of the law'.

 

Also, the DWI talk is derailing the thread a little, but there was a time in our culture that you could drive while drinking a beer, or if you got pulled over for drinking, the officer would give you a slap on the wrist, and tell you to pull over for a while or even give you a ride home. Then heavy lobbying ensued, and the corporations realized you could make a lot more money by incarcerating these people, even though some are just driving buzzed on empty rural roads at 2 AM, while others are wasted blitzing down a crowded freeway during rush hour.

I am not advocating going back to a society that permits all drunk driving, but I think cops are now instructed (and paid) to incarcerate anyone breaking a law, no matter how minute the crime is, and I don't think that's in the long term best interest of the public.

 

I'm not certain that the percentage of prisoners housed in private versus public prisons really damages any of the points I have made (if so, please point out how, I can't see it). Even in the public prisons, inmates work (if they want to receive "good time") and the state has to pay for them to be there.

You didn't address my central point in that argument arc, that the private prison industry is lobbying hard to keep drugs illegal and to continue to ratchet up enforcement.

BTW, I have not seen a single "public incentive" directed at releasing prisoners early or limiting incarceration. In the last thirty years or so, we have gone from a prison population of less than half a million to over 2.1 million today. Where are the early releases and incarceration limiting programs?

 

Yes, they work in the laundry facility or the cafeteria or the library. They work to get things done, but you make it sound like there's a factory floor that they're working on, producing goods that are sold for giant profits. It's not the case. It costs $80 per prisoner per day to house them, even taking into account any sort of prison labor.

The fact that there's a private prison lobby doesn't mean that lawmakers cater to said lobby. I'm sure that there is a lobby. I'm also sure that the people of the state of Texas don't build new prisons and the legislature doesn't draft new laws simply because some lobbiest asks them to.

Sentencing on drug cases are today much shorter than they have been, I didn't realize that you were unaware of that fact. Take mar1juana, for example. The Boggs Act (1952) and the Narcotics Control Act (1956), for example, set mandatory minimums for any mar1juana possession at 2 to 10 years and up to a $25,000 fine. In the 70s (the 30 year ago timeframe you've referred to), possession of mar1juana in Texas was a felony and carried a punishment between 2 years and life. Today, it's a misdemeanor punishable by 0 to 180 days, or probation.

Here's a link to a TDCAA article on early release of prisoners. In the article, it talks about good-time incentives (up to 8 days per day served) for early release. There's a chart that we have on parole eligibility; due to good time credit and quarter-time eligibility an inmate who's sentenced to 2 years is eligible for parole in 2 months, 25 days. Many times someone sentenced to a small sentence is "paroled from county" and never even is transported to prison. The article references a man serving a life sentence for narcotics delivery, released on parole after 8 years.

 

In both the for-profit prison system and the public prison system, inmates do work for corporations. In the federal prison system, inmatesdo lots of call center work for government agencies for up to (after you have been working the job 7 years) $1.45 per hour.

http://www.fourwinds10.com/siterun_data/health/abuse/news.php?q=1213132136

Sure, the industry is lobbying for the heck of it.

In a recent case, a private prison firm built a facility for juvenile offenders, bribed a couple of judges to get the public facility closed, then paid the judges to sentence kids to the newly opened private system. Some of these kids were first offenders without legal representation and were sentenced to years in juvie after a five minute hearing.

Private prisons are an abomination.

http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1202428249328

Posession of a small amount (under 2 ounces) is a misdemeanor, they still have the felony charge for anything more than that.

I'm not saying parole doesn't exist, I'm saying that people should not go to jail for drugs.

 

You asked me about early release / parole and I gave you information; now you say that it's not relevant. So, why would you ask?

I'm not in favor or, or against, private prisons. I don't think they present the problem you do. I don't think that inmates work more than people who are not inmates (i.e., us), and I don't think that it qualifies as slave conditions to pay them less than minimum wage for their work when we're paying $80 a day for each of them to have food and clothing, books and television, internet, air conditioning, and, of course, a bed and a roof. Name me a law in Texas that was passed because it was lobbied for by private prisons and I'll start to get concerned.

One more thing, and I know that once I point out your error, you'll say that it doesn't matter. But mar1juana is only a state felony in Texas in amounts greater than 4 ounces, and even then only carries punishment from 6 months to 2 years (or probation), which is much less than it carried previously. To get any more punishment than that, one has to possess more than 5 pounds.

 

Part of a larger point. If we have lots of parole and early release programs, why has our prison population quadrupled since 1980? You have shown that we indeed have some of these programs, which indicates that even though we are letting people out of prison early, we are still seeing MASSIVE growth in our prisoner population, growth that is due in large part to the drug war.

I argue that we should let nonviolent drug "offenders" (almost a quarter of our prison population) out of prison and let murderers, rapists, and child molesters sit out their entire sentence. It makes sense to me that those are the people who deserve to be in prison, not some guy whose only offense was the possession of an intoxicant.

I am concerned about far more than Texas. I gave you a link to one of the most disgusting set of circumstances ever, children being sent to a juvenile facility by judges receiving kickbacks from the private corporation running the facility. It doesn't matter where it happened, the point is that these are the kinds of abuses you will get with a private corporation running prisons. They will do anything they can to improve the bottom line, and ethics are usually tossed out when it comes to bottom line decisions.

So, you think it is a reasonable punishment to send someone to jail with a felony charge for having four ounces of mar1juana?

That is the real point of this thread and of this discussion. It doesn't make any sense to prohibit drug use. Prohibition has taken all of the harms inherent in drug use and abuse in our society and made them much, much worse. The policy is wrong, counterproductive, and destructive. It has caused a major rift between the police and the communities they are supposed to serve, coruupted our system at every level, and created a situation that is simply not sustainable.

 

BTW, I mostly asked for my own education. I like being up to date on as many of the topics related to the drug war as possible.

 

This was your response that went against my position. I'm actually more starting to look at it in this way now...

Drugs = Crime By Association really might not be the worst thing. It certainly costs a lot possibly way more than it should, but it does what its supposed to - stop crime. The real felonous murderous slimeballs out there, its much easier to round them up on drug charges than it is to calculate their next move. Or wait until they take an innocent victim's life to nab them, which is more emotional toll on the community than arresting 1000 people possessing drugs. Its the best pre-emptive measure to actually prevent crime. There's probably a good 75-80% of people who'll say so WHAT if even the lightest drug user goes to jail, my kids are safe from that person. (Doesnt mean they're right, just saying...)

Drecriminalizing possession is a start. The current system needs some modicifications and it at least opens up the debates for more solutions. In actuality I dont see how decriminalizing possession would have great benefit. People commit drug related crimes because of the high costs of their addiction and the addictictive content in the drug. Decriminalizing drug possession more helps law enforcement shift resources to other things rather than it helping limit drug use. So there has to be a way to cheapen the product by lowering its price and limiting the addictive impurities of hard drugs...yep, only way I see that is government having less prohibition and getting in on the production end themselves.

Its scary to think, but if millions upon billions of people want to do something we're not stopping it, ever. Only thing you can do is lock up someone or kill someone before they do it. Since we dont shoot drug users, and arresting them does little to nothing, time to fund our infrastructure off of them.

 

But the way to change the drug laws is not to break them. I was responding to Red Chocolate's post about how imprisoning drug violators ruins lives. Folks needs to contact their representatives, start grass roots efforts, etc. to get the laws changed. I have no sympathy for folks who are imprisoned for drug violations. Until the laws are changed, they are breaking the law.

How many folks that are posting in this thread other than you (because I strongly suspect you have), that want the laws changed have contacted their representatives or organized grass roots efforts to try and get things changed?