A.C.L.U. In $50M Push to Reduce Jail Sentences
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Hopeful for continued progress!
The US has a strange puritanical undertone to it that doesn't seem to be going away. Things that are considered immoral are outlawed and heavily punished, often with no chance of redemption (i.e. in the US most crimes never expire and it is hard (and expensive) to get them expunged).
You can see this puritanical nature everywhere, from violence Vs. sex on TV, in crimes (i.e. sex is prosecuted disproportionately harshly), video games, and so on, to drugs ("war on drugs," US's obsession with [legal] painkillers, while dishing out anti-depressants like candy), homophobia in general (and "abnormal" things in the bedroom), alcohol, and on and on.
National polls indicate the majority are now in favor of pot legalization. States keep moving step by step toward treating drug addiction as a medical problem instead of a criminal problem. There is extremely wide-spread recognition that we have far too many people in prison, and that the police are far too violent / aggressive; both problems are finally seeing push-back and improvement.
The US has a long history of making sweeping cultural changes, sometimes extremely rapidly, other times extremely slowly. There is immense and continual precedence in the US for the culture moving in the right direction, from women's suffrage, to civil rights, to gay marriage.
America has a problem with alcohol? Where? I think you have it exactly backwards, there is relatively little puritanical anything left in America's culture.
1) The US is the world's largest consumer of alcohol. 2) The US is the world's biggest pornography market. The US is freer when it comes to that, than many European nations that are supposed to be non-puritanical. 3) I have no idea why you referenced video games, there are no actual problems with video games in the US despite whatever sensational blip you might have seen. 4) Most media in the US is perfectly fine with sexuality, you're referring to an extraordinarily small part of it, the broadcast networks.
The one thing the country is, is dynamic. It changes a lot quicker than many other countries.
As the population "ages out" (older people with different societal mores die out, are replaced with younger folks), these changes occur. If you check out the exit polls for Florida for their recent medicinal marijuana ballot initiative, the 65+ age cohort was 62% against/38% for it. Compare that to the 18-29 age cohort (79% for/21% against).
http://cnn.com/election/2014/results/state/FL
I leave it to the reader to calculate the "run rate" at which time ballot measures such as these pass based on actuarial data in various states.
Instead, I see people just not trying to think about it. They become uncomfortable when the subject comes up. There aren't a lot of people making urgent, moral arguments against it—it really does seem like it's driven more by the momentum of law enforcement agencies attempting to justify their own excistance than anything else, and the rest of the country being complicity because they don't want to be labeled a hippy.
Puritanism is based on a morality. Your phrasing indicates how deep seated it is in our culture.
most crimes are out of desperation (particularly drug offenses), not ill-intent, but we punish them the same. the disadvantaged and systemic poor are in situations from which escape is exceedingly difficult. we should have a little compassion and bring sheep back into the fold with forgiveness, not exacerbate the underlying condition. it's not the punishment that keeps people in line anyways, it's social bonds. you need systems that strengthen social bonds for offenders, not tear them apart like prison does.
"there, but for the grace of god, go i" (an apt sentiment, regardless of the religious connotation).
A small fig leaf compared to the Koch budget, but interesting.
http://www.thenation.com/article/173122/what-does-millions-l...
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Disparities in sentencing guidelines between powdered and crack cocaine have had very real effects on sending more poor people to prison:[3]
While a person found with five grams of
crack cocaine faced a five-year mandatory
minimum prison sentence, a person holding
powder cocaine could receive the same
sentence only if he or she held five
hundred grams. Similarly, those carrying ten
grams of crack cocaine faced a ten-year
mandatory sentence, while possession of one
thousand grams of powder cocaine was required
for the same sentence to be imposed.
[2] http://www.sentencingproject.org/doc/publications/inc_federa... (note that this is from 2002)
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Sentencing_Act#Sentencing_...
The effects of putting vaporized cocaine-base ("crack") into the large mucous membranes of the lungs, as opposed to powdered cocaine-HCL ("cocaine") into the much smaller [surface-area] of the nasal area, is so drastically different, that almost every single person reports it being an entirely different type of drug and high.
And what people do to get more cocaine, and what people do to get more crack, is also quite different. Crack addiction takes the person to an entire new level of despair + violence...
When crack hits a cocaine area, whatever problems they had before, is nothing to what happens next, and the entire place goes further down the drain.
Pretending that there is no difference between the two is asinine.
The difference involves a different molecule, enhanced uptake, enhanced bio-availability, a high so intense that people think they are about to have a heart-attack / while at the same time feeling so good that they don't care, etc...
The justification is usually made with respect to "urban environments", "public housing", and "poor people", eliding over the racial implications.
Also, street gangs like the Crips, Bloods, and Vice Lords were turning streets into war zones as they struggled to gain control over the crack trade. Nowadays, black gangs control the PCP market, and sentences for that are harsher than something like Ketamine, another dissociative anaesthetic. The media are also all too happy to put a naked psycho running around, punching passing cars, on their evening news.
The legislators can try to justify it all they like, but all of us watching can clearly see that whether it is intentional or not, causative or merely correlative, the mandatory sentencing laws are putting more black people into prison, and keeping them there longer. "Three strikes" laws are having a similar effect.
There was public hysteria over crack, and Congressional Democrats wanted to show they were "tough on crime."
This should help disabuse you of such thinking. The Racist War on Drugs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wONAqaxgIoo
(And I wish to be proven wrong.)
Mind you, different people have different senses of where the easiest or most urgent places are to advance that broad cause. But that's true of all of us, and not just in feminism: some people make charitable gifts to local soup kitchens, others to global malaria prevention, and yet others to the EFF. That's why it's so crucial for a wide range of people to be part of the feminist movement: to effect large-scale social change, we need people with passion working on as many fronts as possible.