What a pity it is, that it took Chimpy’s destruction of the US economy to finally wake officials up as to the utter stupidity of felonizing every little thing for the past 30 years.

There is no way in hell a lot of these two-bit punks should ever have gone to prison, and taking latitude away from Judges with the incredibly stupid “mandatory minimum” sentencing statutes did little more than pack prisons full of people who hadn’t been, and probably never would have been, any kind of a threat to public safety. We can trace this back to the conservotard-inspired “war on drugs,” which has actually been for the most part a war on common sense.

Thanks to sharply reduced revenues courtesy of The Bush Economic Miracle, common sense is making a comeback in State Legislatures all over the country. The people who screamed that nonviolent drug offenders should have been sent into diversional programs were dismissed as librul crackpots 10 years ago; today, they are known as “State Governments.” All over the country, Governors and Legislatures are actually waking up to the idea that maybe packing the prisons full of nickel and dime punk dope dealers wasn’t the best way to control crime or spend taxpayer money. The US, with more people per capita under lock and key than any society on Earth save perhaps the DPRK, has become the “Land of the Jailed” – a distinction that might seem agreeable to Fascist Chimpletons, but is generally abhorrent to those of us who believe the term “free society” should be taken literally. I think just about everyone knows that in spite of all the stupid punks they’ve locked up, it has never been hard to score anything you want, usually fairly quickly. Obviously, the punks never were the problem; the insanity of the “war on drugs” was, and is, the problem.

This rush to reform is way overdue, but just watch the same dumbasses who thought the “mandatory minimum” shit up screw up what needs to be done to fix what they broke. We’ve put a whole lot of harmless people inside prisons that also happened to contain people who were a great deal less harmless, and you can bet that a lot of these former harmless punks are now angry young men and women with an ax to grind. There is almost no chance that States will recognize the problems that they, themselves, created, so we can safely assume that they will do little or nothing to try to help these newly-minted potential timebombs defuse their anger. As surely as we paid for this stupidity over the last 30 years, we will keep paying for this stupidity for at least the next 10 or 20 more years. And all of it was avoidable, with a little bit of sensible policy.

Instead, we got insane “tough on crime” policies promoted by pandering asshole politicians. Now, what I imagine we’ll get in return are a whole lot of criminals who are tough on US.

Tags: failed policy, incarceration, war on drugs

This entry was posted on Monday, May 5th, 2008 at 3:12 pm and is filed under Analysis, Stupidity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.