I'm not questioning one way or the other, but I'd like to see some statistics to better understand this.
"Marijuana arrests now account for over half of all drug arrests in the United States. Of the 8.2 million marijuana arrests between 2001 and 2010, 88% were for simply having marijuana."
So that's 7.2 million arrests simply for possession.
In 2010 police arrested someone for weed-related things every 37 seconds.
However it is important to note that an arrest is not a conviction. Most are fined or are placed into community supervision. About 40,000 inmates of state and federal prison have a current conviction involving marijuana.
That's a lot, and there are likely a lot more that ended up in prison due to problems with having an arrest record (that should also be wiped imo) so that is a lower limit but the point is that overall - even without a ton of active prisoners there is still a massive effect of all those arrests.
Also it's worth noting that black people are nearly 4 times as likely to be arrested for these things even though usage rates are the same across races.
2 of the times in the station were alcohol related, everything else is weed from stop and search. One thing to note, as soon as I opened my mouth in each incident, there was no further threat from the police of taking it to court, despite me having no decent legal representation. Sounding posh goes very far with the police here.
Since something like 95% of convictions are plea deals, it seems to me that the official charges probably aren't a great guide to this, at all.
My example is this: the police want to crack down on a gang, and have some informants. They round up all the foot soldiers, who are standing duty on street corners etc. To put them away on conspiracy charges will be hard work, and will expose informants. But they don't have to -- once the gangsters are scared of having last week's murder pinned on them, they'll sign anything with a few years sentence. And so they get locked up for possession.
Anyone have any idea how to get a handle on how big this effect is? While the rest of the thread seems to believe 100% of soft drug convictions are for drugs, it seems equally plausible to me that this could be close to 0%. How would we tell?
My impression is that what I describe basically is the system right now. But I'd be interested to find ways to understand better whether this impression is true.
If the prosecutors wanted to convict them of something else, they should've followed the procedure to do so - to refuse to prosecute and then to claim that people are actually guilty of something they've never been tried for is something dictatorships and fascist states do.
I was truly astonished to learn that plea deals were such a huge majority of convictions. The negotiations which lead to them are entirely behind closed doors. So it looks to me like the US has had an almost complete rewrite of its justice system, while preserving a little of the old UI. I would love to be wrong about this, but actually struggle to find good information (hence my question). But supposing that I am right, do you really think this would not be worth understanding? Would pretending that we are running the old system be a good path towards changing it back?
If you want to discuss plea bargains in general, you're wildly off-topic in a harmful way - there's context in this discussion that you've decided to ignore without saying so, and in doing so, appeared to support the argument that people shouldn't be let free because they might actually be guilty of something else (that they've never been convicted of). I can promise you I'm not the only person who read your comment and thought you were saying that.
We aren't gathered here to vote on the fate of these people. And I resent the idea that every comment needs an elaborate bow to your preferred policies, elaborate avoidance of "harmful" ways to read things I apparently said "without saying" them.
To say otherwise, in my opinion, is to say that speech has little value - in which case why does the US protect it so highly?
I actually worry that this plea bargain business is a sign that we have implemented a justice system much more scary than what everyone else is discussing. A system which locks people up for having a little weed is bad... and also pretty trivial to work around. A system which locks people up for reasons known only to the DA, who is free to lie and threaten behind closed doors, is fucking terrifying.
Do we even know which of these systems we have? That's what I was hoping people could help me understand.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/releasing-drug-offender...