175 Influential Community Leaders Call On Obama To End The Drug War

It is inspiring to see this well-organized effort making the case. Below is the letter that was sent to President Obama and the 175 people who have joined the fight as activists in the fight to end the drug war and mass incarceration policies:

Your hard work and leadership on issues affecting the unrepresented classes of people in our nation have served as an inspiration to many of us who hope for brighter futures for all Americans. In that spirit, we believe the time is right to further the work you have done around revising our national policies on the criminal justice system and continue moving from a suppression-based model to one that focuses on intervention and rehabilitation. We are proud of your accomplishments around these issues, specifically your leadership on gun control, your investments in “problem solving courts,” your creation of the Federal Interagency Reentry Council, your launching the National Forum on Youth Violence Prevention and your prosecution of a record number of hate crimes in 2011 and 2012. We certainly hope that this type of leadership is appreciated by all members of Congress, regardless of political affiliation, and you are joined by members of all parties in your pursuit of a more perfected union.

Mr. President, it is evident that you have demonstrated a commitment to pursue alternatives to the enforcement-only “War on Drugs” approach and address the increased incarceration rates for non-violent crimes. Your administration has moved in the right direction by committing increased funds to drug prevention and treatment programs and supporting state and local re-entry grants. We encourage you to continue your efforts to revamp the policies of the last 30 years that have seen the prison population skyrocket.

The greatest victims of the prison industrial complex are our nation’s children. Hundreds of thousands of children have lost a parent to long prison sentences for non-violent drug offenses, leaving these children to fend for themselves. Many of these children end up in the criminal justice system, which comes as no surprise as studies have shown the link between incarceration and broken families, juvenile delinquency, violence and poverty.

Mr. President, we are a coalition of concerned advocates that is ready to support you in more innovative criminal justice reform and implementing more alternatives to incarceration. As you set in motion research and policy to combat this societal crisis, this coalition is poised to help you make the transition successful. In 2010, the passage of the Fair Sentencing Act was a tremendous step in the right direction, and we appreciate how hard you worked on getting that done. Some of the initial policies we recommend is, under the Fair Sentencing Act, extend to all inmates who were subject to 100-to-1 crack-to-powder disparity a chance to have their sentences reduced to those that are more consistent with the magnitude of the offense. We ask your support for the principles of the Justice Safety Valve Act of 2013, which allows judges to set aside mandatory minimum sentences when they deem appropriate.

We ask that you form a panel to review requests for clemency that come to the Office of the Pardon Attorney. Well-publicized errors and omissions by this office have caused untold misery to thousands of people. Additionally, we want to applaud your staunch commitment to re-entry programs that are necessary to ensure that those who leave the system are able to become productive members of society as well as reliable husbands, fathers, mothers and wives. We certainly would like to help you achieve an increase in the number of these transition programs. Finally, we strongly urge you to support the Youth Prison Reduction through Opportunities, Mentoring, Intervention, Support, and Education (Youth PROMISE) Act, a bill that brings much needed focus on violence and gang intervention and prevention work.

During your presidency you have made important steps and you now have the opportunity to leave a legacy by transforming our criminal justice system to an intervention and rehabilitation based model. Many of those impacted by the prison industrial complex are among your most loyal constituents. Your struggles as the child of a single mother allow you to identify with millions of children who long to be with their parents. We request the opportunity to meet with you to discuss these ideas further and empower our coalition to help you achieve your goals of reducing crime, lowering drug use, preventing juvenile incarceration and lowering recidivism rates. We stand with you, ready to do what is just for America.




CIVIL RIGHTS LEADERS & ADVOCATES


Harry Belafonte

Julian Bond

Dr. Benjamin Chavis

Major Neill Franklin, LEAP

Rev. Jesse Jackson

Benjamin Todd Jealous, NAACP

Avis Jones-Deweever, National Council of Negro Women

Maria Theresa Kumar, VotoLatino

Donna Leiberman, NYCLU

Margaret Moran, LULAC

Marc Morial, National Urban League

Ethan Nadelmann, Drug Policy Alliance

Rev. Al Sharpton, NAN

Rashad Robinson, Colors of Change

Anthony Romero, ACLU

Michael Skolnik

Julie Stewart, Families Against Mandatory Minimums

Susan Taylor

Dr. Boyce Watkins

Brent Wilkes, LULAC

Vanessa Williams, National Conference of Black Mayors

Rev. Lennox Yearwood, Hip-Hop Caucus


ENTERTAINMENT


La La Anthony

Roseanne Barr

Russell Brand

Jim Carrey

Cedric The Entertainer

Margaret Cho

Affion Crockett

Rosario Dawson

Cameron Diaz

Mike Epps

Omar Epps

Jamie Foxx

Tyrese Gibson

Adrian Grenierhere u

Jon Hamm

Hill Harper

Woody Harrelson

Amber Heard

Dule Hill

Ron Howard

J Ivey

Terrence J

Eugene Jarecki

Kris Jenner

Scarlett Johannson

Kim Kardashian

Khloe Kardashian-Odom

Kourtney Kardashian

Sanaa Lathan

LL Cool J

Nia Long

Eva Longoria

AnnaLynne McCord

Demi Moore

Michael Moore

Keya Morgan

Jay Pharaoh

Dominic Purcell

Tim Robbins

Chris Rock

Susan Sarandon

Sarah Silverman

Russell Simmons

Vanessa Simmons

Jada Pinkett Smith

Will Smith

Tika Sumpter

Gabrielle Union

Denise Vasi

Mark Walhberg

Estella Warren

Kerry Washington

Pauletta Washington

Marlon Wayans

Jesse Williams

Jeffrey Wright


FAITH COMMUNITY


Bishop James Clark

Bishop Noel Jones

Bishop Clarence Laney

Bishop Edgar Vann

Dr. Iva Carruthers

Deepak Chopra

Father Michael Pfleger

Rabbi Robyn Fryer Bodzin

Rabbi Menachem Creditor

Rabbi Nina Mandel

Rev. Jamal Bryant

Rev. Delman Coates

Rev. Leah D. Daughtry

Rev. Dr. Fredrick Haynes

Rev. Michael McBride

Rev. Dr. W Franklyn Richardson


MUSIC INDUSTRY


David Banner

Eric Benet

Andre “3000″ Benjamin

Big Boi of Outkast

Case

Charlamagne tha God

Sean “Diddy” Combs

Chuck D

DJ Envy

DJ Pauly D

Ani Difranco

Jermaine Dupri

Missy Elliot

Estelle

Jason Flom

John Forte

Ghostface Killah

Ginuwine

Keri Hilson

Jennifer Hudson

Ice-T

Luke James

Trinidad James

Lyfe Jennings

Jim Jones

Talib Kweli

John Legend

Ryan Leslie

Joanna “JoJo” Levesque

Kevin Liles

Ludacris

Lil Wayne

Natalie Maines

Angie Martinez

Nicki Minaj

Mya

Q-Tip

Busta Rhymes

Steve Rifkind

Samantha Ronson

Rick Ross

RZA

Timeflies

Katrina “Trina” Taylor

Teyana Taylor

Angela Yee


BUSINESS LEADERS

Sir Richard Branson

Ron Busby, US Black Chamber of Commerce

Daymond John

Minyon Moore

Chip Rosenbloom, Owner St. Louis Rams

Bobby Shriver


ELECTED OFFICIALS


Congressman Tony Cardenas

Congressman Keith Ellison

Congresswoman Marcia Fudge

Congresswoman Barbara Lee

Congressman Bobby Rush

Congressman Bobby Scott


ATHLETES

Brendon Ayanbadejo

Allan Houston

Isareal Idonije

Lamar Odom

Etan Thomas

Isiah Thomas

Mike Tyson


FASHION INDUSTRY


Tyson Beckford

Selita Ebanks

Kenza Fourati

Kimora Lee Simmons

Veronika Verekova


MEDIA


Chris Broussard

Chuck Creekmur, AllHipHop.com

Ed Gordon

TJ Holmes

Cathy Hughes, Radio One

Alfred Liggins, Radio One

Dylan Ratigan

Jim Wallis, Sojourners

Dave Zirin


ACADEMIA & THOUGHT LEADERS


Michelle Alexander

Dr. Carlton Brown, Clark Atlanta Univ.

Prof. Michael Eric Dyson

Dr. Christopher Emdin

Dr. Michael Fauntroy

Dr. Eddie Glaude

Airickca Gordon-Taylor

Dream Hampton

Dr. Marc Lamont Hill

Naomi Klein

Dr. Jawanza Kunjufu

Dr . Wilmer Leon

Dr. Julianne Malveaux

Dr. John E. Maupin, Jr., Morehouse School of Medicine

Kevin Powell

Dr. Stanley Pritchett, Morris Brown College

Ricky “Freeway” Ross

Dr. Tyra Seldon, Co Chair, Education Over Incarceration (EOI)

Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum, Spelman College

INFO-GRAPHIC: Drug War and Mass Incarceration Numbers

The Drug War And Mass Incarceration By The Numbers

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/08/drug-war-mass-incarceration_n_3034310.html

NEW YORK -- Despite an increased emphasis on treatment and prevention programs in recent years, the Obama administration in its 2013 budget still requested $25.6 billion in federal spending on the drug war. Of that, $15 billion would go to law enforcement, interdiction and international efforts.

The pro-reform Drug Policy Alliance estimates that when you combine state and local spending on everything from drug-related arrests to prison, the total cost adds up to at least $51 billion per year. Over four decades, the group says, American taxpayers have dished out $1 trillion on the drug war.

What all that money has helped produce -- aside from unchanged drug addiction rates -- is the world's highest incarceration rate. According to the Sentencing Project, 2.2 million Americans are in prison or jail.

More than half of federal prisoners are incarcerated for drug crimes in 2010,according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and that number has only just dipped below 50 percent in 2011. Despite more relaxed attitudes among the public at large toward non-violent offenses like marijuana use, the number of people in federal prison for drug offenses spiked from 74,276 in 2000 to 97,472 in 2010, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

The punishment falls disproportionately on people of color. Blacks make up 50 percent of the state and local prisoners incarcerated for drug crimes. Black kids are 10 times more likely to be arrested for drug crimes than white ones -- even though white kids are more likely to abuse drugs.



CORRECTION: This piece has been changed to make clear the drop in the percentage of federal prisoners in custody for drug crimes from 2010 to 2011.

A chart produced by the American Civil Liberties Union shows just how staggeringly large the US prison population has grown.

NYPD wasted 1 MILLION MAN HOURS taking people to jail for weed over last decade!!!

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/19/nypd-marijuana-arrests_n_2908285.html

NEW YORK -- The NYPD spent 1 million hours making 440,000 arrests for low-level marijuana possession charges between 2002 and 2012, according to a new report released Tuesday -- just as legislative leaders in Albany are deciding whether to pass a bill reforming drug laws.

The Drug Policy Alliance and the Marijuana Arrest Research Project, pro-drug law reform groups that commissioned the report, said its findings show a "huge waste" of police resources.

"We cannot afford to continue arresting tens of thousands of youth every year for low-level marijuana possession,” Alfredo Carrasquillo, a civil rights organizer with the activist group VOCAL-NY, said in a release. “We can't afford it in terms of the negative effect it has on the future prospects of our youth and we can't afford in terms of police hours."

The drug reform proposal from Gov. Andrew Cuomo would decriminalize small amounts of marijuana in public view. Possessing 25 grams or less of marijuana kept out of sight is currently a violation, subject to a $100 penalty in New York state.

Thousands of New York City residents, a disproportionate number of them black or Latino, have been arrested for emptying their pockets on the order of police during stop-and-frisk encounters.

Cuomo has made reforming the marijuana law a top legislative priority this year. In June, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and New York City Police Department Commissioner Raymond Kelly made the surprise announcement that they, too, supported Cuomo's plan.

In 2012, according to the report, the NYPD made 39,218 low-level possession arrests. The report assumed police spent an average of 2.5 man-hours on such arrests, amounting to 98,045 hours in 2012.

The NYPD did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the Drug Policy Alliance's numbers.

Activists have been sharply critical of Bloomberg's record on marijuana, pointing out that during his tenure, the NYPD has arrested more New Yorkers for marijuana possession than the last three mayors combined. But in February, Bloomberg announced that New Yorkers would no longer have to be held in jail overnight for possession.

Alternet: Quit taking KIDS to jail for weed

Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)

Home > Full-Body Pat-Downs in America's Schools: How the War on Drugs Is a War on Children

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The Nation [1] / By Patricia J. Williams [2]

Full-Body Pat-Downs in America's Schools: How the War on Drugs Is a War on Children

February 18, 2013  |  

This article first appeared on the Nation.com. [3] For more great articles subscribe here.  [4]

On a warm spring afternoon at American colleges, the intoxicating aroma of surely medicinal marijuana will be floating like a soft caress in the breeze, and hard-working students will be stocking up on amphetamine cocktails to sharpen their overstressed young minds for the coming exams.
 
On a warm spring afternoon at the nation’s poorer public schools, children (and I mean children) will endure a daily police presence, including drug-sniffing dogs, full-body pat-downs, searches of backpacks and lockers, stops in the hallways—all in the name of searching for contraband.
Drugs are ubiquitous in this country, and yet we know that some people have the privilege of doctor-prescribed intoxication, while others are thrown into dungeons for seeking the same relief. We know that the war on drugs is heavily inflected with Jim Crow–ism, economic inequality, gun culture myths and political opportunism. We know that Adam Lanza’s unfortunate mother was not the sole Newtown resident stocking up on military-style weapons; plenty of suburban gun owners keep similar weapons to protect their well-kept homes against darkly imagined, drug-addled marauders from places like Bridgeport. We divert resources from mental health or rehab, and allocate millions to militarize schools.

The result: the war on drugs has metastasized into a war on children.

Best publicized, perhaps, is the plight of young people in Meridian, Mississippi, where a federal investigation is probing into why children as young as 10 are routinely taken to jail for wearing the wrong color socks or flatulence in class. Bob Herbert wrote of a situation in Florida in 2007, where police found themselves faced with the great challenge of placing a 6-year-old girl in handcuffs too big for her wrists. The child was being arrested for throwing a tantrum in her kindergarten class; the solution was to cuff her biceps, after which she was dragged to the precinct house for mug shots and charged with a felony and two misdemeanors.

In New York City, kids who make trouble are routinely removed from school altogether and placed in suspension centers, holding cells or juvenile detention lockups. In the old days, you got a detention slip for scrawling your initials on a desk. Now a student can be given a summons by a school police officer. If the kid loses it or doesn’t want to tell his parents, it becomes a warrant—and a basis for arrest.

According to the New York Civil Liberties Union, some 
77 percent of New York’s school police interventions are for noncriminal matters like having food outside the cafeteria, having a cellphone or being late. Other minor offenses like shouting, getting into petty scuffles or being on school grounds after hours fall into the category of “disruptive behavior”—an offense that can get a student suspended. Just 4 percent of police interventions are in response to “major crimes against persons.”

But what’s a teacher to do? In New York City, police officers outnumber guidance counselors by more than 2,000.

Yet as Newtown should teach us, we love our guns as much as we love our drugs. We know that even our best efforts at gun control will not undo a simultaneous and enthusiastic installation of armed overseers in our public schools. As such forces grow exponentially across the country, we keep them busy by installing zero-tolerance policies that take disciplinary discretion out of teachers’ hands and put it in the hands of law enforcement officers with little to no training in child psychology, mediation or anger management. Indeed, the NYCLU recently filed a complaint after the NYPD arrested Mark Federman, the principal of East Side Community High School, for intervening as the in-school officers hauled away an honor student.

This “school-to-prison pipeline” has emerged suddenly. Over just the last two decades, we got scared. We sent guns and billy clubs into our schools on purpose. We provided federal funds for massive surveillance systems—for cameras like they have in Oakland, monitoring every inch of school life from a command center. We slashed budgets for books, salaries, computers, psychologists, librarians and buildings. We dealt with classroom overcrowding
by segregating those with learning difficulties, shunting them into tracks where they have no chance.

On top of that, we instituted blunt metrics by which teachers lose pay or even their jobs depending on student outcomes. If scores aren’t good—regardless of how difficult the students’ life circumstances or language challenges or learning disabilities—
it is teachers who are held responsible. With so much at stake, calling the school police is one way to remove lower-performing students from the classroom on high-stakes testing days.

And with the police being given incentives for making a large number of arrests, why wouldn’t the rational officer bring charges of “disturbance of education” or disorderly conduct for catfights in the hallways, when he might beef up his salary with the easy frog-march of juvenile perps to the precinct?

The most vulnerable targets may be children of color, but this war on kids is a war on all children. Ultimately, the lack of due-process protections and human dignity in ghetto schools leaches into suburban schools. It doesn’t really matter whether one side views it as protecting against the dark side with zero-tolerance strip searches for ibuprofen, while the other side experiences it as an annexing of the prison-industrial complex onto daily life. Criminalizing children will have constitutional implications for generations to come. It is corrosive and rends the fabric of our erstwhile civil society, makes a lie of equal opportunity, and rewards authoritarian personality disorder at the expense of our humanity. 

Slavery Through Immoral Mass Incarceration

The Prison Industry in the United States: Big Business or a New Form of Slavery?

Private prison companies such as Corrections Corporation of America and G4S sell inmate labor at subminimum wages to Fortune 500 corporations like Chevron, Bank of America, AT&T and IBM.

By Vicky Pelaez

Source:http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-prison-industry-in-the-united-states-big-business-or-a-new-form-of-slavery/8289

Human rights organizations, as well as political and social ones, are condemning what they are calling a new form of inhumane exploitation in the United States, where they say a prison population of up to 2 million – mostly Black and Hispanic – are working for various industries for a pittance. For the tycoons who have invested in the prison industry, it has been like finding a pot of gold. They don’t have to worry about strikes or paying unemployment insurance, vacations or comp time. All of their workers are full-time, and never arrive late or are absent because of family problems; moreover, if they don’t like the pay of 25 cents an hour and refuse to work, they are locked up in isolation cells.

There are approximately 2 million inmates in state, federal and private prisons throughout the country. According to California Prison Focus, “no other society in human history has imprisoned so many of its own citizens.” The figures show that the United States has locked up more people than any other country: a half million more than China, which has a population five times greater than the U.S. Statistics reveal that the United States holds 25% of the world’s prison population, but only 5% of the world’s people. From less than 300,000 inmates in 1972, the jail population grew to 2 million by the year 2000. In 1990 it was one million. Ten years ago there were only five private prisons in the country, with a population of 2,000 inmates; now, there are 100, with 62,000 inmates. It is expected that by the coming decade, the number will hit 360,000, according to reports.

What has happened over the last 10 years? Why are there so many prisoners?

“The private contracting of prisoners for work fosters incentives to lock people up. Prisons depend on this income. Corporate stockholders who make money off prisoners’ work lobby for longer sentences, in order to expand their workforce. The system feeds itself,” says a study by the Progressive Labor Party, which accuses the prison industry of being “an imitation of Nazi Germany with respect to forced slave labor and concentration camps.”

The prison industry complex is one of the fastest-growing industries in the United States and its investors are on Wall Street. “This multimillion-dollar industry has its own trade exhibitions, conventions, websites, and mail-order/Internet catalogs. It also has direct advertising campaigns, architecture companies, construction companies, investment houses on Wall Street, plumbing supply companies, food supply companies, armed security, and padded cells in a large variety of colors.”

According to the Left Business Observer, the federal prison industry produces 100% of all military helmets, ammunition belts, bullet-proof vests, ID tags, shirts, pants, tents, bags, and canteens. Along with war supplies, prison workers supply 98% of the entire market for equipment assembly services; 93% of paints and paintbrushes; 92% of stove assembly; 46% of body armor; 36% of home appliances; 30% of headphones/microphones/speakers; and 21% of office furniture. Airplane parts, medical supplies, and much more: prisoners are even raising seeing-eye dogs for blind people.

CRIME GOES DOWN, JAIL POPULATION GOES UP
According to reports by human rights organizations, these are the factors that increase the profit potential for those who invest in the prison industry complex:

.Jailing persons convicted of non-violent crimes, and long prison sentences for possession of microscopic quantities of illegal drugs. Federal law stipulates five years’ imprisonment without possibility of parole for possession of 5 grams of crack or 3.5 ounces of heroin, and 10 years for possession of less than 2 ounces of rock-cocaine or crack. A sentence of 5 years for cocaine powder requires possession of 500 grams – 100 times more than the quantity of rock cocaine for the same sentence. Most of those who use cocaine powder are white, middle-class or rich people, while mostly Blacks and Latinos use rock cocaine. In Texas, a person may be sentenced for up to two years’ imprisonment for possessing 4 ounces of marijuana. Here in New York, the 1973 Nelson Rockefeller anti-drug law provides for a mandatory prison sentence of 15 years to life for possession of 4 ounces of any illegal drug.

. The passage in 13 states of the “three strikes” laws (life in prison after being convicted of three felonies), made it necessary to build 20 new federal prisons. One of the most disturbing cases resulting from this measure was that of a prisoner who for stealing a car and two bicycles received three 25-year sentences.

. Longer sentences.

. The passage of laws that require minimum sentencing, without regard for circumstances.

. A large expansion of work by prisoners creating profits that motivate the incarceration of more people for longer periods of time.

. More punishment of prisoners, so as to lengthen their sentences.

HISTORY OF PRISON LABOR IN THE UNITED STATES
Prison labor has its roots in slavery. After the 1861-1865 Civil War, a system of “hiring out prisoners” was introduced in order to continue the slavery tradition. Freed slaves were charged with not carrying out their sharecropping commitments (cultivating someone else’s land in exchange for part of the harvest) or petty thievery – which were almost never proven – and were then “hired out” for cotton picking, working in mines and building railroads. From 1870 until 1910 in the state of Georgia, 88% of hired-out convicts were Black. In Alabama, 93% of “hired-out” miners were Black. In Mississippi, a huge prison farm similar to the old slave plantations replaced the system of hiring out convicts. The notorious Parchman plantation existed until 1972.

During the post-Civil War period, Jim Crow racial segregation laws were imposed on every state, with legal segregation in schools, housing, marriages and many other aspects of daily life. “Today, a new set of markedly racist laws is imposing slave labor and sweatshops on the criminal justice system, now known as the prison industry complex,” comments the Left Business Observer.

Who is investing? At least 37 states have legalized the contracting of prison labor by private corporations that mount their operations inside state prisons. The list of such companies contains the cream of U.S. corporate society: IBM, Boeing, Motorola, Microsoft, AT&T, Wireless, Texas Instrument, Dell, Compaq, Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, Nortel, Lucent Technologies, 3Com, Intel, Northern Telecom, TWA, Nordstrom’s, Revlon, Macy’s, Pierre Cardin, Target Stores, and many more. All of these businesses are excited about the economic boom generation by prison labor. Just between 1980 and 1994, profits went up from $392 million to $1.31 billion. Inmates in state penitentiaries generally receive the minimum wage for their work, but not all; in Colorado, they get about $2 per hour, well under the minimum. And in privately-run prisons, they receive as little as 17 cents per hour for a maximum of six hours a day, the equivalent of $20 per month. The highest-paying private prison is CCA in Tennessee, where prisoners receive 50 cents per hour for what they call “highly skilled positions.” At those rates, it is no surprise that inmates find the pay in federal prisons to be very generous. There, they can earn $1.25 an hour and work eight hours a day, and sometimes overtime. They can send home $200-$300 per month.

Thanks to prison labor, the United States is once again an attractive location for investment in work that was designed for Third World labor markets. A company that operated a maquiladora (assembly plant in Mexico near the border) closed down its operations there and relocated to San Quentin State Prison in California. In Texas, a factory fired its 150 workers and contracted the services of prisoner-workers from the private Lockhart Texas prison, where circuit boards are assembled for companies like IBM and Compaq.

[Former] Oregon State Representative Kevin Mannix recently urged Nike to cut its production in Indonesia and bring it to his state, telling the shoe manufacturer that “there won’t be any transportation costs; we’re offering you competitive prison labor (here).”

PRIVATE PRISONS
The prison privatization boom began in the 1980s, under the governments of Ronald Reagan and Bush Sr., but reached its height in 1990 under William Clinton, when Wall Street stocks were selling like hotcakes. Clinton’s program for cutting the federal workforce resulted in the Justice Departments contracting of private prison corporations for the incarceration of undocumented workers and high-security inmates.

Private prisons are the biggest business in the prison industry complex. About 18 corporations guard 10,000 prisoners in 27 states. The two largest are Correctional Corporation of America (CCA) and Wackenhut, which together control 75%. Private prisons receive a guaranteed amount of money for each prisoner, independent of what it costs to maintain each one. According to Russell Boraas, a private prison administrator in Virginia, “the secret to low operating costs is having a minimal number of guards for the maximum number of prisoners.” The CCA has an ultra-modern prison in Lawrenceville, Virginia, where five guards on dayshift and two at night watch over 750 prisoners. In these prisons, inmates may get their sentences reduced for “good behavior,” but for any infraction, they get 30 days added – which means more profits for CCA. According to a study of New Mexico prisons, it was found that CCA inmates lost “good behavior time” at a rate eight times higher than those in state prisons.

IMPORTING AND EXPORTING INMATES
Profits are so good that now there is a new business: importing inmates with long sentences, meaning the worst criminals. When a federal judge ruled that overcrowding in Texas prisons was cruel and unusual punishment, the CCA signed contracts with sheriffs in poor counties to build and run new jails and share the profits. According to a December 1998 Atlantic Monthly magazine article, this program was backed by investors from Merrill-Lynch, Shearson-Lehman, American Express and Allstate, and the operation was scattered all over rural Texas. That state’s governor, Ann Richards, followed the example of Mario Cuomo in New York and built so many state prisons that the market became flooded, cutting into private prison profits.

After a law signed by Clinton in 1996 – ending court supervision and decisions – caused overcrowding and violent, unsafe conditions in federal prisons, private prison corporations in Texas began to contact other states whose prisons were overcrowded, offering “rent-a-cell” services in the CCA prisons located in small towns in Texas. The commission for a rent-a-cell salesman is $2.50 to $5.50 per day per bed. The county gets $1.50 for each prisoner.

STATISTICS

Ninety-seven percent of 125,000 federal inmates have been convicted of non-violent crimes. It is believed that more than half of the 623,000 inmates in municipal or county jails are innocent of the crimes they are accused of. Of these, the majority are awaiting trial. Two-thirds of the one million state prisoners have committed non-violent offenses. Sixteen percent of the country’s 2 million prisoners suffer from mental illness.

TIME MAG: Are we on the way to adult use legalization?

Will States Lead the Way to Legalizing Marijuana Nationwide? 

By Adam CohenJan. 28, 20135 Comments 

When citizens of Colorado and Washington voted to legalize marijuana in November they created a conflict, because pot remains illegal under federal law and anyone who lights up is committing a federal crime and could theoretically still be arrested for it. After Colorado passed the referendum, Governor John Hickenlooper said the implementation of the law in his state would be a “complicated process” and he warned residents not to “break out the Cheetos or Goldfish too quickly.”

While it seems unlikely that the federal government will make much of an effort to arrest pot users in Colorado or Washington—Obama has said he has “bigger fish to fry”— the tension between federal and state laws on marijuana remains. Just last week, an appeals court rejected a suit that sought to lower the classification of medical marijuana under federal drug laws.

That court ruling threw the issue back to Congress and the Drug Enforcement Agency, which should start a serious reconsideration of national policy toward marijuana. The federal government should start by reclassifying medical marijuana, legalizing it outright, or at least dialing down the penalties. And it should begin to have the sort of serious discussion about legalizing recreational marijuana that is now occurring in the states.

(MORE: U.S. Marjuana Laws Ricochet Through Latin America)

The campaign to legalize marijuana has long been viewed as a fringe cause, backed by young people and old hippies. That perception has lingered even though public opinion polls have shown that a growing percentage of the public favors legalization – as much as 68% in one recent poll. In the past two decades, supporters of marijuana have focused on legalizing medical use, and they have had impressive success. Today, 18 states and the District of Columbia have made medical use legal – and at least seven morestates are considering it. Meanwhile, the DEA still classifies marijuana as a “schedule 1” drug under the federal Controlled Substances Act of 1970 – a classification for drugs that have no accepted medical use. Americans for Safe Access, a pro-marijuana group, challenged this classification, but last week the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit rejected the lawsuit. That ruling left in place the DEA’s blunt position that there is “no currently accepted medical use for marijuana in the United States.”

The votes in Colorado and Washington were a watershed, however, because they shifted the debate from medical marijuana to outright legalization. And the votes were not even close. In Colorado, the referendum passed by more than 6%. In Washington, the margin was 10%.

Afterwards, President Obama said that the federal government has a lot of crime to prosecute and “it does not make sense from a prioritization point of view for us to focus on recreational drug users in a state that has already said that, under state law, that is legal.” Last week, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee said that he had a conversation with Attorney General Eric Holder that encouraged him about his state’s ability to carry out the referendum legalizing marijuana.

(MORE: New Research Questions Marijuana’s Impact In Lowering IQ)

It is good that the Obama administration appears to be standing down now, but that has not always been the case. As recently as last year, the Justice Department was cracking down on medical marijuana producers in California and other states. There is no way to know that the federal government will continue to leave marijuana policy to the states. And whatever policy the Obama administration adopts, it could be undone when a new President takes office.

Justice Louis Brandeis once said that the states should function as “laboratories,” testing new ideas for possible adoption by the whole nation. We have seen enough over the past 16 years from the states that have legalized medical marijuana to know that the benefits are real and the alleged dangers overblown. With this data in hand, the DEA should reclassify marijuana to acknowledge its possible medical uses.

In Colorado and Washington, a bolder experiment is now underway. The rest of the nation should watch closely. It is possible that legalization will lead to higher crime rates, increased use of harder drugs, and other menaces that marijuana critics warn about. But if legalization in these states has few negative effects, we will have the strongest argument yet for why marijuana should be legal nationwide.

Read more: http://ideas.time.com/2013/01/28/will-states-lead-the-way-to-legalizing-marijuana-nationwide/#ixzz2JHmohFcV

Chicago Tribune: War on pot a failure

The war on pot is no safe bet

Protecting teens? It hasn't worked
Source: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/ct-oped-0120-chapman-20130120,0,7436520.column
by Steve Chapman
January 20, 2013

As recreational drugs go, marijuana is relatively benign. Unlike alcohol, it doesn't stimulate violence or destroy livers. Unlike tobacco, it doesn't cause lung cancer and heart disease. The worst you can say is that it produces intense, unreasoning panic. Not in users, but in critics.

Those critics have less influence all the time. Some 18 states permit medical use of marijuana, and in November, Colorado and Washington voted to allow recreational use. Nationally, support for legalization is steadily rising. A decade ago, one of every three Americans favored the idea. Today, nearly half do — and among those under 50, a large majority does.

These trends have die-hard drug warriors screaming bloody murder. Former Rep. Patrick Kennedy, D-R.I., has formed a new organization to stop what he imagines to be the "300-miles-per-hour freight train to legalization." He says that such a change would be especially harmful to teenagers.

White House drug czar Gil Kerlikowske insists that even allowing medicinal pot "sends a terrible message" to adolescents. Mitchell Rosenthal, a psychiatrist who founded the substance-abuse treatment group Phoenix House, says there is "mounting evidence of the dangers it poses, especially to young users."

They might have a point if existing drug laws were keeping weed out of the hands of wayward kids. In truth, they're about as effective as a picket fence in a tidal wave. In a 2009 survey, high school students said they found it easier to get than beer. In 2011, 23 percent of 12th-graders said they had used weed in the preceding month.

In the past five years, drinking and cigarette smoking have dropped by more than 10 percent among high school seniors. But pot smoking has risen by 23 percent. Alcohol and tobacco are legal for adults. Marijuana is not.

What these trends indicate is that authorizing the sale and use of a substance does not necessarily mean more people will use it. There is no contradiction between letting adults make up their own minds, with some government regulation, and providing effective education for youngsters about the hazards of underage consumption.

No one, after all, is talking about putting pot in vending machines or handing out blunts at Taylor Swift concerts. The idea is to treat pot like booze — permitting its sale and use to adults in a government-regulated market, with penalties for behavior (like driving under the influence) that endangers other people.

The tolerance-fuels-use theory is thunderously lacking in real-world support. In the Netherlands, where "coffee shops" are allowed to sell pot, teenagers are far less likely to use it than their American peers.

The experience here falls short of bloodcurdling. "In the states that have passed medical-marijuana laws, youth marijuana use has decreased," Amanda Reiman, policy manager for the Drug Policy Alliance, told me. In California, "the number of seventh-, ninth- and 11th-graders reporting marijuana use in the last six months and in their lifetimes all declined" after 1996, when the state passed its medical marijuana law.

The alleged harms of cannabis on the teen mind and body are generally exaggerated. Critics have trumpeted a study last year that said teenagers with a heavy habit turn out to have lower IQs as adults than their peers who avoided the stuff.

But a new assessment by Norwegian scientist Ole Rogeberg, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, concluded that the IQ differences might well stem from differences in income, education and other factors. "The true effect," he said, "could be zero." It's pretty clear that heavy drinking is a far bigger danger to developing brains.

Those worried about the welfare of potheads might also want to take into account the dangers that exist only because cannabis is illegal. Criminals who grow or supply the stuff have little incentive to monitor quality, prevent adulteration or assure consistent doses.

A kid who gets his hands on beer doesn't have to worry about getting toxic chemicals or nasty fillers. Buying pot in illicit markets may also expose users of all ages to violence, robbery or extortion. But you don't see innocent bystanders getting killed in shootouts among liquor store owners.

The alternative to legalization is sticking with a policy that has produced millions of arrests, squandered hundreds of billions of dollars and turned many harmless people into criminals in the eyes of the law — all while failing to stem the popularity of pot. For kids or adults, there is nothing healthy in that.

Steve Chapman is a member of the Tribune's editorial board and blogs at chicagotribune.com/chapman.

schapman@tribune.com

Twitter @SteveChapman13