EvilKimEvil wrote:
It's scary. Anyone with a pet toad could get arrested. Who knows what they'll turn to next. Will they start arresting people for posessing nutmeg? Or morning glories? Some people try to get high off of those things too. And then there's glue, and anything in an aerosol can. The fact is that we live in a world full of things that can be used to alter one's state of mind or are rumored to do so. I don't think there's any way to change that.
The politicians and the prison industry make more money this way, more than they'd get from taxing consumption of the drug, like most governments do with alcohol and cigarettes. This way, they can tax everyone (to pay for cops and prisons) rather than simply those who choose to consume a given, legal substance.
Follow the money.Quote:
According to a 2005 report of the International Centre for Prison Studies in London, the United States—with five percent of the world’s population—houses 25 percent of the world’s inmates. Our incarceration rate (714 per 100,000 residents) is almost 40 percent greater than those of our nearest competitors (the Bahamas, Belarus, and Russia). Other industrial democracies, even those with significant crime problems of their own, are much less punitive: our incarceration rate is 6.2 times that of Canada, 7.8 times that of France, and 12.3 times that of Japan. We have a corrections sector that employs more Americans than the combined work forces of General Motors, Ford, and Wal-Mart, the three largest corporate employers in the country, and we are spending some $200 billion annually on law enforcement and corrections at all levels of government, a fourfold increase (in constant dollars) over the past quarter century.
Never before has a supposedly free country denied basic liberty to so many of its citizens. In December 2006, some 2.25 million persons were being held in the nearly 5,000 prisons and jails that are scattered across America’s urban and rural landscapes. One third of inmates in state prisons are violent criminals, convicted of homicide, rape, or robbery. But the other two thirds consist mainly of property and drug offenders. Inmates are disproportionately drawn from the most disadvantaged parts of society. On average, state inmates have fewer than 11 years of schooling. They are also vastly disproportionately black and brown.
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A son of fire should be forced to bow to a son of clay?
05 Dec 2007, 7:24 am
