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Comment by ahmeneeroe-v2 | Hacker News Reader

Often that reason is "committed a horrific violent crime"

Weed, though. In some states, now legal.

Non-violent marijuana users haven't ever materialized as a large cohort of the prison population. Sorry, I too used to believe that prisons were overflowing with them

I mean if this was the 90s, yes it was true but you are also correct that it's very rare for anyone to be in prison for just marijuana alone in the US. Even in states where it's "illegal."

Not really? I mean, when you compare the number of people who have committed a "horrific violent" crime to the total number of people caught up in the US prison system, I expect it's not "often".

The numbers are fuzzy but they indicate that at least a simple majority of (and possibly up to an extreme majority) of prisoners have committed violent crimes.

That really depends on what you classify as “violent”. There are a lot of crimes labeled “violent” that don’t include direct physical harm to another person. Eg burglary is labeled as “violent” many places when the actual act was “smashed a window, grabbed a TV and ran away”. Drug manufacturing is also typically considered “violent” even without any kind of assault/murder/turf war/etc.

The numbers I saw said 47% of inmates had a violent crime under federal or state classifications.

Often it is.

Often it is not.

Often, they too are a victim of our judicial system, and we can't just ignore them due to the peers we locked them in with.

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