Victimless crimes get life in prison

From The Guardian:

“At about 12.40pm on 2 January 1996, Timothy Jackson took a jacket from the Maison Blanche department store in New Orleans, draped it over his arm, and walked out of the store without paying for it. When he was accosted by a security guard, Jackson said: “I just needed another jacket, man.” A few months later Jackson was convicted of shoplifting and sent to Angola prison in Louisiana. That was 16 years ago. Today he is still incarcerated in Angola, and will stay there for the rest of his natural life having been condemned to die in jail. All for the theft of a jacket, worth $159……The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world, with 2.3 million people now in custody, with the war on drugs acting as the overriding push-factor. Of the prisoners serving life without parole for non-violent offences nationwide, the ACLU estimates that almost 80% were for drug-related crimes.Again, the offences involved can be startlingly petty. Drug cases itemised in the report include a man sentenced to die in prison for having been found in possession of a crack pipe; an offender with a bottle cap that contained a trace of heroin that was too small to measure; a prisoner arrested with a trace amount of cocaine in their pocket too tiny to see with the naked eye; a man who acted as a go-between in a sale to an undercover police officer of marijuana – street value $10.  Read the full story…

From “Strange Fruit,” chapter 25, dealing with the consequences of blending the coercive state with private enterprise.

“One of the most frightening strange fruits to come from the mating of coercion with free enterprise is the increased reliance on privatization of the prison industry. Here we have the state creating a private industry that relies upon the state’s coercive power to supply it with a stream of new customers (inmates). This industry has become a strong lobby in support of maintaining and increasing those laws carrying prison sentences. As the Correctional Corporation of America warned in its 2010 annual report: “Any changes [in the laws] with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them.”Private prisons have enjoyed many years as a “hot” investment stock in America since their introduction in the 1980s. In the three decades that followed we saw the American prison population increase five-fold, from one-half million to two and one-half million, during a time in which crimes, with or without victims, have remained relatively constant.”

From “Victimless Crimes,” chapter 17 –

…Of course these resources should be spent to stop real crime and its causes, but as long as the state is running things, it will be in the long-term interest of the prison industry to have more prisons and of the police service to have more crime.”

The State Is Out Of Date, We Can Do It Better – Instant download for the cost of a cup of coffee. Print edition available from all online book sellers.

Some sanity? Less madness, perhaps.

The US is running out of prison space and having to take measures. Since most of the pressure is caused by mandatory sentencing for people found altering their mental states with unapproved substances, they may be a lightening up on incarceration of harmless citizens. But it’s an inadequate measure, as this article observes. I wonder what will happen when the private prison industry catches up in its building program.

The Drugs Problem, chapter 27

“Backflow occurred too, in the War on Drugs, when in the early 1980s the CIA are believed to have helped distribute crack cocaine to America’s inner cities in order to covertly fund the Nicaraguan contras. History will undoubtedly judge that the War on Drugs was itself the largest causative factor of America’s downhill slide into dangerous drug abuse. This would not be the first time that coercive state programs have produced opposite results to those intended. This war has clogged courts and jails worldwide with drug cases, creating far more problems than drugs ever posed on their own.”

This Is Why People Hate the Federal Government

From Businessweek on July 11, 2013:

This Is Why People Hate the Federal Government

Defense Secretary Hagel is begging Congress to stop spending cuts, while officials within his agency are telling employees to spend down their coffers.

From Chapter 10, A Terminal Toolbag:

“State structures rarely have any mechanism that adjusts their size to the needs of the occasion, and most commonly measure their success by the level of next year’s budget increase. So they overgrow if enough money is available.”