We lock up more people than we have ever locked up before. Our incarceration rate was flat until about 1979. Then things changed. Every year we locked up more and more people. We now lock up several times as many people, both on a per capita basis and in total, then we ever did at any time prior to 1979. We have the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world. We are getting to where we let people out earlier and earlier, but that's because we can't afford to keep building new prisons. We do still lock people up on long sentences though, and often it's for low level drug crimes. I see it all the time. I watched part of a trial last year where a decorated Vietnam vet with a clean record got 30 years for selling a half a gram of meth to some druggie lady who called him numerous times begging for him to please help her find some dope. She was just trying to make three buys to stay out of prison and the phone records showed something like 17 calls made by her ton him in a few day period, and he testified that he went and got some for her because they had been friends and she wouldn't stop begging him to do it.
I've seen people get life over small amounts of dope. Fifteen or twenty years is not uncommon at all. Prosecutors here will normally start out with a forty with twenty suspended offer, unless the guy has a bad record, and that's for gram or less sales. The option for these people is usually to either go set some people up, or go to prison for several years before being eligible for parole. I'm in a small town but every week here several people will get sentenced to long prison terms over a little bit of dope.
I think people just have some really skewed ideas about what works and what doesn't, the crime rate, the state of the criminal justice system. You talk about us being country “knee-deep in violence” and having “overflowing jail cells.” Are prisons are overflowing, but we are not “knee-deep in violence. Violent crime is down. The crime rate in general was higher when I was a kid in the late Sixties and early Seventies. There may be some perception of high crime now but if you look at the historical statistics, crime is down. Our murder rate is lower now than it's been in decades. You watch 24 hour news and and may not seem that way but crime is down. I think we have way too much news now and these people trying to sell advertising find all the salacious and scary things they can find to fill all those extra hours with to keep viewership up.
I'm in the South, and maybe things are just different here. but I'm certainly not seeing serious criminals getting let off left and right. I'm also not seeing a bunch of “liberal judges.” Even the Democrat judges around here are basically prosecutors in black robes who want everyone convicted and punished severely. They get elected on tough on crime platforms, as do the prosecutors, and they are hard as Hell on people. Our prosecutors keep a running tally of the number of people they've put in prison for the year posted in their office with last year's total and a thing saying how many more they need to lock up to beat last year's record. They are all about locking people up, and they do go for long sentences, especially on drug cases. We get a little bit of a “plea discount,” but they aren't going to go that far below what they think a defendant would get if he took his case to trial. And on drug delivery cases people always get hammered if they lose at trial so the prosecutors know they can start high in negotiations and not budge much because none of these people want to go to trial because the transactions are almost always on tape. You're liable to get less time at trial for a murder here than selling meth or cocaine. Routinely even if people plead their cases low level drug crimes will result in stiffer sentences than residential burglaries and all sorts of other serious crimes. I think that's crazy because I'd much rather have a doper sell dope to another doper than break in my house and steal my stuff and put my family in danger. If it were up to me we'd lock those guys up a lot longer because we'd actually be preventing a lot of future crime where people are being victimized. We don't prevent anything locking all these people up on long sentences for selling a gram or less of dope because all the people who would have bought from them will just buy from someone else.
I won't keep going with this thread. I'm sorry for the long posts. It's just frustrating to me that so few people know what really goes on in the system, how low the crime rate actually is, and how wasteful and pointless some of the things we do really are. All this ignorance is causing us an awful lot of unnecessary problems. The best thing that has happened in a long time in one way is that the economy is in the tank and governments are beyond broke. That causes people to think about what we are spending all our money on and does seem to be resulting in some more sensible policies in the criminal justice system.
My entire point is if drugs were not so readily available (because of no severe punishment), there would not be a huge drug problem...no overcrowding in jails, no people getting caught selling meth to some lady who bugged her for a few days, etc.
Many of those in prisons who are there for robberies, murders, etc., committed the crimes while high on drugs. They may not have been dealing, but were just high at the time.
Get rid of the drugs and we automatically get rid of the prison problems. That’s just it a nutshell. And as an added benefit, we as a society can get rid of many of the crimes being committed in our communities, both city and rural, and may actually live in some peace again. Who knows, maybe teenagers will even show respect to their parents and teachers again.
Oh, by the way, I’m in the South too. Born and reared.