What a system.
What. The fuck? A 19-year-old gets caught selling drugs so we... make it harder for them to get an education that might give them more attractive options than selling drugs? We... make it more likely for them to go deeper into debt, if they do try to get an education, so make certain kinds of alternative income more attractive to them? What possible sense could that make?
I expressed, to the tax accountant who'd told me this, some confusion re: why we'd have a policy that would clearly tend to increase recidivism, hoping he'd be able to explain why this wasn't obviously stupid, and all he came back with was something like "I guess you're some kind of bleeding heart liberal then." Dafuq? I mean, on the one hand, sure, guilty as charged, but what does that have to do with preferring to have less crime happen?
I'm not trying to be a cool edgelord kind, but really. It has appeared, over the course of my life, that most "unsolvable" political issues really amount to trying to do what's "right" instead of what's "good" for society.
Gun control - knee jerk morality issue. Abortion - same thing. Education reform. Prisons and law enforcement. Drugs. The number just goes on forever.
It's because we don't care to have less crime happen. We care that people are appropriately punished for being bad.
It's very frustrating.
Each of those three elements: not unlimited, needing priority, and prioritized thusly could be viewed by people as being sensible.
Whether it should be unlimited is a different question from "given it's not unlimited, how should we prioritize it?"
I couldn't care less about drugs and think everything up to and including fentanyl should be completely legal and sold at the 7-eleven, but fuck paying the bill for that. Sorry dealers, pay for your own college.
Australian state and federal governments subsidised fossil fuels to the tune of a staggering $11.6 billion in 2021/22.
Should student drug dealers receive state and federal funding for their education?
Yep.
Drug dealers are providing a public service, taking on a fair amount of risk to deliver a service the community requires.
Nothing makes much sense.
If all we've got is opinions, let's go with mine.
P.S. I didn't down vote your comment, I up voted it because I engaged with it.
Yeah, my heart goes out for all those underprivileged Harvard/Cornell/Rutgers students with loaded parents, who at some point in their ivy league degree and due no fault of their own, suddenly find themselves at a point where they just have to take up drug-dealing.
> And he didn't even harm anybody else.
It's a she. And chances are, if you're dealing heroin, you are probably harming someone.
Yes, won't someone please get that silver spoon out of her mouth. People who come from a middle-class life can end up in bad situations as well.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keri_Blakinger#Homelessness,_a...
> People who come from a middle-class life can end up in bad situations as well.
There's little indication that any of the bad situations she ended up in had external causes. May then one's sympathy with the self-inflicted hardships of the privileged not at least be conditional on a little readiness to assume some responsibility?
When she writes:
> After almost a decade of struggling with heroin addiction, I’d gotten arrested just a few days before I was supposed to finish my last semester at Cornell.
It sounds like the system conspired to rob poor struggling Keri of her Cornell(TM) degree right before the finish line. The reality is that she was a drug dealer caught with $150'000 worth of heroin in her possession (she brags about it elsewhere). But to her the real story are the minor inconveniences the prison system temporarily put in the way of her completing her degree and one of 50 states banning her inspirational and recently released life-story. She does not disagree with proscribing certain books for prisoners but appears offended that the somewhat arbitrary lists different states have drawn up do not completely match the arbitrary list she personally would have drawn up (and fail to fully reflect her own tastes in the ravings of murderous psychopaths).
The thing I've found most maddening when sending material to inmates is that you cannot, for obvious reasons, send used books. It's totally understandable, but things can become expensive.
Why ban the books entirely?
Books have been used to pass codes since their early creation.
If an inmate is still engaged in criminal operations, passing books back and forth makes it easy to still operate.
Also there is some risk of the book containing contraband. You can x-ray them but that doesn't catch everything, especially not narcotics.
The legal system is chiefly concerned with moving people out of urban centers into rural areas, where their incarceration is paid for through state tax revenue, redistributing the money from urban to rural areas.
This is the reason why prison lobbies are the strongest political opponents of drug decriminalization or legalization - reducing prison occupancy reduces profits per prisoner.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Codes_(United_States)#:~....
It has expanded its reach since then though. While the legal has a hard time incarcerating people who haven’t committed crimes (although it still does this, and actively builds up its pipeline for fresh bodies), it’s still able to exploit innocent people for profit. You can see this in prisons strategy of removing and banning in person visits, moving convicts far from their communities, and extorting families with predatory prices to communicate with their loved ones.
This ignores that he broke the law. Being punished for breaking the law isn't a revolutionary idea.
He doesn’t mention what he was convicted of, just that he had heroin addiction problems. The incident leading to his arrest may have included violence, we just don’t know because he did not provide enough info.