Summary: gibberish
>it’s not primarily the War on Drugs that’s driving this beast. Instead, it’s an all-out assault that “extends a brute egalitarianism across the board.”
What that does even mean?
>it’s not primarily the War on Drugs that’s driving this beast. Instead, it’s an all-out assault that “extends a brute egalitarianism across the board.”
What that does even mean?
For example zero-tolerance, mandatory sentencing, not doing pardons anymore, not releasing people on parole when they behave well and so on.
1. Drunk driving (no victim of course) 2. Evading arrest 3. Apparently you had sex with your girlfriend when you both were 15.
Welcome to Oz, citizen!
Oh, you can no longer vote, so forget that "citizen" part.
Also, the area where the policies linked to that alleged "brute egalitarianism" are most prominent are drug offenses and areas related to violence against police officers sold largely by the violence in the war on drugs, so even if they did produce a "brute egalitarianism" it wouldn't be "across the board", it would still stem directly from the war on drugs.
That the leeway in the past was more often used the other way. Consider attenuating circumstances etc.
> Blacks in Minnesota are about eleven times more likely to be incarcerated than whites, giving Minnesota the country’s highest black-white disparity in imprisonment. But Minnesota also has one of the lowest incarceration rates in the country. So overall, African Americans are less likely to be sent to prison in Minnesota than in the South, which is a more equal opportunity incarcerator
He is not disputing that the war on drugs is a proximate cause of our higher incarceration rates. He is saying that attempts to solve the problem by releasing non violent drug offenders can't solve the issue alone.
> Unfortunately, the issue is getting framed in a way that’s too narrowly focused on the War on Drugs. In fact, if we released everyone now serving time in state prisons whose primary charge is a drug offense, we would reduce the state prison population by only 20 percent
They make this point while acknowledging that the "War on Drugs" does disproportionately affect African Americans and women.
Throughout the article they make several statements that indicate to me they think there should be more discretion allowed on deciding which punitive actions should be taken.
Discretion is a big part of how we ended up with "three strikes" and mandatory minimums. People have not forgotten the outrageous abuses of discretion that were common in the '70s and '80s; activist judges abusing their discretion are not a figment of the right wing knuckle dragger imagination and it was routine for some judge to create a headline with lenient sentences that offended all sensibility.
The problem extends to prosecutorial discretion as well; this [1] sort of headline from this past Wednesday -- again illustrating the failure of the justice system and reinforcing our current state of affairs -- is still very common and does not escape notice, no matter how much you might wish it would. Then you have the abuses we see on the national stage regarding "prosecutorial discretion" in immigration policy, selective prosecution of violations of classified information handling we've seen recently, and many, many others.
It only takes a few activist judges or prosecutors to polarize an electorate. Right or wrong that's the actual world we live in and ignoring that reality won't ever work.
[1] http://www.thesmokinggun.com/buster/drunk-driving/thirteen-t...