Lock them up with other maladjusted people for years, then let them loose on society with a hardened attitude, extensive criminal connections, and no ability to find employment?
Firstly, where is pulling back policing happening? I don't know of a single city that has actually reduced their police size to any real sense?
Additionally, how do we know this isn't just correlation and not causation? Inflation is higher, more people are addicted to things, housing insecurity is rising.
Most metropolitan areas. Seattle [1][2] and Minneapolis [3] have both established public policies of not responding to, citing, or arresting for a wide range of offenses.
> I don't know of a single city that has actually reduced their police size to any real sense?
Minneapolis has reduced the number of police officers, through various means, by 30%. [4]
> Additionally, how do we know this isn't just correlation and not causation?
Because we have multiple studies proving a causal relationship. [5][6]
[1] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/times-watchdog/sea...
[2] https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/seattle-police-bellevue-oth...
[3] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-poli...
[4] https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/minnesota-supreme-cou...
[5] https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/rssa.12142
(EDIT: I am not in the US but many here are, here's some stats: https://www.statista.com/statistics/191219/reported-violent-...
EDIT2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States )
Crime rates have multiple causes to them, many go years back.
Maybe we should try to address the root causes instead of locking up more people? We have tough times economically, many reasons for people to despair, endless incitement to violence as means of resolving disagreements or other problems.
At the very least, a harsher approach to law enforcement has to be coupled with some path forward to address the other issues.
Primarily as a completely organized and funded way to attack recently elected "progressive" city officials. After the enemy prosecutor/sheriff disappears, the crime wave evaporates as fast as the complaints about kids in cages did when Biden took over.
So if this was the strategy of the U.S until about 2010 I suppose it would have been morally justifiable as an act of self-preservation to kill anyone that saw you smoking pot - assuming of course that there is such a thing as personal rights and people had the right to smoke pot, but the government prevented them from doing so.
on edit: perhaps I'm in a bad mood but I do find it astounding how often when one of these articles comes out about how inhumane the American prison system is, whole branches of the discussion devolve into conflicting ideas on how one can make it more inhumane.
If you were certain that you can never quit smoking pot/rehabilitate in prison then perhaps your action "could be" justifiable.
You should be aware that drug use is not affecting only you. You also fund an international criminal enterprise. If you want to use drugs then take the hard, legal way(i.e political activism).
As far as I'm concerned all drugs should be legal and served in hospitals unpon request at reasonable prices or free for those who cannot afford them. But I'm not making the laws so I'm not looking providing drugs to addicts at affordable prices either regardless of how ethical would be.
If you have a right to smoke pot then you should not have to rehabilitate yourself, just as you should not have to love Big Brother or any other number of things.
>If you want to use drugs then take the hard, legal way(i.e political activism).
here I'm wondering if you are using 'you' to refer to people in general or to me? Either way it's sort of silly, hardly anybody is going to say I will do drugs after my political activism to make doing drugs legal succeeds! If it's to me I don't smoke pot, but I do believe people have the right to do it.
So if you are going to be thrown in prison on an indefinite sentence for something you have the right to do then I would advocate extreme violence for anyone that was in danger of being arrested for smoking pot.
In the end your indefinite time until rehabilitation proposal is more extreme than the current American system.
>As far as I'm concerned....
reading your last paragraph I get the feeling your view of 'drugs' is they are all somehow the same as heroin?
Well, if you have that right into law then I don't understand why you think you risk going to jail.
As far as I am concerned I believe people should be allowed to take any drug they want and even commit assisted suicide for any reason they want (as long as they are sane). After all we own our body and the gov should only protect us from abuse from others(i.e misleading advertising like they did with the tabacco).
That being said I believe in indefinite time until rehabilitation. If the law is wrong we should work to fix it instead to bend it at the expense of so many especially for crimes that lead to violent/tragic outcomes.
I also think people should own the effects of their choices. Buying from criminal or terrorist organisations does lead to tragic situations for many people regardless of the product you buy. Being ignorant shouldn't absolve you of guilt.
The fact that the mandatory minimums for crack were so much higher than for powder cocaine was a good thing. They're an admission that the system is openly racist, and a target to aim at. Without them, we'd just have judges sentencing white snorters to probation and putting black smokers under the jail on their own discretion, and we'd need statistics that we wouldn't be given access to in order to make a case. It's better when racism is out in the open rather than buried in a judge's latitude.
> The fact that the mandatory minimums for crack were so much higher than for powder cocaine was a good thing. They're an admission that the system is openly racist, and a target to aim at.
So you're saying the system is racist and we're seeing it in the value of mandatory minimums, therefore we should aim for more mandatory minimums to even out the racism? Do you believe the same thing when it comes to police shooting black men, i.e. that more white men should also get shot in order to live in a world that's more fair? Therefore making it a "good thing" that people get shot at all?
I goggled this: https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen...
I think it's kind of interesting. The people one might concerned about are probably: "Homicide, Aggravated Assault, and Kidnapping Offenses" -> 3.2% of prisoners. "Robbery" -> 2.8% ...
I think the first question is what % of all prisoners should probably not be there in the first place and how do you deal with the root causes of them getting there. Then we can worry about when we let them out.
How could this be done in practice?