Quote:
Originally Posted by JPhillips
How about we stop locking up so many non-violent drug offenders and use some of the savings to pay for cameras?
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It's more complicated than that. The police and department of corrections don't have any say about what sentences people get. Even though they tend to get the blame for everything. The Director of the Department of Corrections in my state briefly tried to push a "zero growth" slogan - as in zero growth of the prison population. But it was really just a wish, there's nothing he could do. State legislatures have to either reduce the number of police officers (and some communities do have WAY too many police officers) and let more crimes go un-prosecuted, or impose lower maximum sentences to limit courts' discretion.
Legalizing weed helps a little but nearly as much as people think. There are not a lot of marijuana-only drug traffickers serving time in state prisons. Even in my state which probably has the most harsh marijuana laws in the country, marijuana-only traffickers get probation. The stats on those things tend to be really skewed, you really have to get to the source data and how they're defining things. Depending on the study, Anybody serving time on a drug case is considered "non-violent", even if they're ALSO serving time for violent crimes, or for trafficking harder drugs. Anybody serving time on a marijuana sentence is considered someone "in prison for marijuana", even if they're ALSO serving time for other crimes, or if they violated their marijuana probation by committing some other crime. We can definitely still do better here, and everybody says they want to reduce the prison populations, but nobody with actual power to do so seems to act on that very often. (If it was up to me, I'd reduce maximum sentences across the board for many crimes, but, for whatever reasons, state legislatures are generally unwilling to do that - even when the state correction agency recommends it.)
Edit: And at the federal level I'd get rid of all minimum sentences for drug cimes, but that's not really as big an issue in my state, where courts can sentence probation on most drug crimes, but often choose not too. And of course, probation and real rehabilitation efforts are pointless unless there's some mechanism for having your probation revoked if you don't comply with the rules of probation. That's the trickiest part of the whole thing to me. In my state we have rehabilitation-focused drug courts, which many people have been very successful on, but there's always people who just can't or won't comply with those kinds of things, and those are the ones that tend to fill up the jails and prisons. Maybe the best solution fiscally would be to just cut them off and cut them loose, and the loss of the free rehab and treatment is the punishment instead of jail....but we're not quite there yet to where that's realistic. The state doesn't have a magic wand to cure addiction, and they don't have the will yet to just ignore it and let these people go kill themselves. It's like with mental health - the criminal justice system provides the opportunity for the state to have jurisdiction over people, to require treatment, to require accountability with that treatment