"Rich Ahrens" wrote in message
use.com...
Gig601XLBuilder wrote:
Mxsmanic wrote:
Morgans writes:

Prisoners in the US are there for good reason, and most all are multiple offenders,
or else major felony offenders.

Eighty percent of U.S. prisoners are in prison on drug charges.

That 80% number while technically either true or close to true also include a
metric-butt load of people that the drug offense was secondary to another offense
non-drug related offense. Which pretty much proves the point that that drugs cause
crime in general.

Hardly. Keep repeating this mantra: correlation does not prove causation.

A significant portion of the drug offenders who got prison time were the result of the
"tough on crime and drugs" movement of the 1980s and the ensuing mandatory sentencing
laws. Addicts whose only crime was possession (and maybe a count of petty larceny) got
the book thrown at them, as if that would help them or scare drug abusers into stopping.
We're wasting millions by incarcerating people who neither deserve such harsh sentences
nor will benefit from them. Meanwhile, many prisons are bulging beyond capacity which in
turn means that they don't have the resources to provide internal security against crime,
clamp down on criminal gangs, or provide meaningful rehabilitation. They've become
warehouses keeping their inmates in cesspool conditions, much like the "insane asylums" of
the past. This in turn opened the door for private enterprise prisons because the goal no
longer is justice and rehabilitation, but warehousing all those perps at the lowest unit
cost.