Why Republicans Should Support Legalizing Marijuana

Trying to talk establishment Republicans into legalizing marijuana has always been an uphill battle. They don't care about the medical benefits of marijuana nor do they support the right of an individual to use and grow marijuana. In fact, Republicans generally prefer that marijuana users and growers be imprisoned for the crime of indulging in something that the social conservatives hold in the highest disdain, namely the natural right of every human being to control their own bodies and life.

The closest I ever came to not being laughed out of a Republican gathering on the marijuana legalization issue was when I told them "you absolutely should support legalizing marijuana because the liberals would be too damn stoned to find their way to the polls on election day and you would start winning elections by default".

Pot prisoners cost taxpayers billions, and the primary beneficiary of imprisoning non violent drug offenders and casual users is America's growing Prison Industrial Complex.  The lost War on Drugs has cost American taxpayers over $1 trillion and we have more drug users than ever.

But there is good news on the drug legalization front as the American people are slowly waking up to the utter nonsense of the War on Drugs.  In red state conservative Bible belt Kansas, a Kansas jury discovered jury nullification.

Prosecutor Defeated by Glaring Stupidity of Pot Laws

A Kansas defense attorney reports:

"I had a jury trial this morning on level 3 possession with intent MJ, level 4 possession drug paraphernalia and level 10 no drug tax stamp. During voir dire, my almost all white, middle-class, middle-aged jury went into full rebellion against the prosecutor stating that they wouldn't convict even if the client's guilt was proven beyond a reasonable doubt -- almost all of them! They felt marijuana should be legalized, what he does with it is his own business and that the jails are already full of people for this silly charge. Then, when the potential jurors found out that the State wanted him to pay taxes on illegal drugs, they went nuts. One woman from the back said how stupid this was and why are we even here wasting our time. A "suit" from the front said this was the most ridiculous thing he'd ever heard. The prosecutor ended up dismissing the case. Judge gave me a dismissal with prejudice. I'm still laughing my ass off over this one. I have NEVER seen a full on mutiny by an entire jury pool before. Easiest win ever!"

Not quite jury nullification, but close. Something similar happened in Montana a couple of years ago.

If folks in Kansas are ready to acknowledge how silly and damaging our idiotic drug laws really are then that should be taken as a sign by the Republican Party that marijuana legalization is an issue  whose time has definitely arrived.

For more on the War on Drugs, see:

The Top Five Special Interest Groups Lobbying To Keep Marijuana Illegal (police unions, private prison corporations, alcohol and beer companies, pharmaceutical corporations and prison guard unions).

America's Prison Industrial Complex: Locking Up Folks For Corporate Prison Profits is the American Way

Police Unions, Rehab Owners Tainted With Sex Abuse Scandal Mount Effort To Stop Colorado From Legalizing Marijuana

The War on Drugs is Racist and Expensive

Legalizing drugs, especially marijuana, holds the potential to breath new life into the ailing GOP. The logical place to start is to abolish the federal law criminalizing marijuana and kick the issue back to the states where the folks in those states can decide how they want to handle marijuana.  

America: A Prison Nation Where Just About Every Human Activity is Criminalized

The state represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the state is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence." - Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi

In theory, the only reason a criminal justice system should even exist is to facilitate justice for victims of crimes.  In reality, the criminal justice system is nothing more a hugely expensive statist enterprise that generates revenues for the government and the increasingly privatized prison industry while providing a guarantee of job security for police and prison guard unions.

A truly just criminal justice system works like this: No victim, No crime

According to the International Centre for Prison Studies, America, with a population of 310 million, has over 2.2 million folks in prison and China, a nation with a population of 1.3 billion, has far less folks in prison. 

1. United States of America 2,266,832
2. China 1,640,000
3. Russian Federation 738,400
4. Brazil 514,582
5. India 368,998

Why do we have so many folks locked up? Is America just a more crime ridden and violent place than other nations?  Is crime actually escalating?   According to the New York Times, "The number of violent crimes in the United States dropped significantly last year, to what appeared to be the lowest rate in nearly 40 years..."

If violent crime has been significantly dropping in the US for 40 years, then why are so many folks in prison and why is the US prison population exploding?  It makes no sense.  But our jails and prison systems are overflowing with folks who shouldn't even be in prison.  Many folks are definitely rotting in prison for possession of marijuana and other victimless or minor crimes.

The cost of a nation of incarceration

A report by the organization, "The Price of Prisons," states that the cost of incarcerating one inmate in Fiscal 2010 was $31,307 per year. "In states like Connecticut, Washington state, New York, it's anywhere from $50,000 to $60,000," he said.

Yes - $60,000 a year. That's a teacher's salary, or a firefighter's. Our epidemic of incarceration costs us taxpayers $63.4 billion a year.

The explosion in incarceration began in the early 1970s...

Americans are a people obsessed with 'there ought to be a law' and they routinely rant and rave to outlaw everything they don't personally approve of. The cost of the criminalization of human behavioral choices like smoking pot or prostitution is far greater than the cost of maintaining the prison industrial complex.  The social costs are devastating.  Families are broken up, separated and they suffer greatly when a breadwinner is imprisoned for a victimless crime. When folks are finally sprung from prison, they can't get a job because of their criminal record and this typically drives them into desperation that includes committing real crimes.

Prison Math

Housing nonviolent, victimless offenders with violent criminals for years on end can’t possibly help them reintegrate into society, which helps explain why four out of 10 released prisoners end up back in jail within three years of their release.

As the Harvard sociologist Bruce Western and the University of Washington sociologist Becky Pettit showed in a 2010 study published by the Pew Center on the States, incarceration has a lasting impact on men’s earnings. Taking age, education, school enrollment, and geography into account, they found that past incarceration reduced subsequent wages by 11 percent, cut annual employment by nine weeks, and reduced yearly earnings by 40 percent. Only 2 percent of previously incarcerated men who started in the bottom fifth of the earnings distribution made it to the top fifth 20 years later, compared to 15 percent of never-incarcerated men who started at the bottom.

It isn’t just offenders whose lives are damaged. Western and Pettit note that 54 percent of inmates are parents with minor children, including more than 120,000 mothers and 1.1 million fathers. One in every 28 children has a parent incarcerated, up from 1 in 125 just 25 years ago. Two-thirds of these children’s parents were incarcerated for nonviolent offenses.

Over a period of 40 years, we've spend over $1 trillion dollars on the idiotic War on Drugs, here and CNN reported that Marijuana laws just creates criminals.

It's time for America to rethinks its criminal justice system and restore it to what it's supposed to be - prosecuting and locking up dangerous criminals who are truly harmful to society while decriminalizing victimless crimes and personal behavioral choices that do not create victims.

America's Prison Industrial Complex: Locking Up Folks For Corporate Prison Profits is the American Way

The absolute worst president in US history could very well be Richard M. Nixon. Nixon is responsible for de-tethering the dollar from gold with an Executive Order and creating the War on Drugs. Nixon totally destroyed the purchasing power of the dollar and permanently rendered the dollar a fiat paper currency that is manipulated to transfer wealth from the 99% to the 1%.

Nixon's 40 year War on Drugs has cost American taxpayers over $1 trillion dollars and birthed America's Prison Industrial Complex.  The result is that the American prison system is overflowing with folks who are rotting in prison for mostly minor drug offenses.  This has spawned a huge privatized prison industrial complex that lobbies state and federal legislators to criminalize more and more routine human activities.  The results of Police State USA are astounding.  America, a nation with a population of 310 million, has over 2.2 million folks locked up in prison while China, a nation with 1.3 billion folks only has 1.6 million in prison.  America has more folks in prison than any nation on the planet and by a wide margin, here.  The New York Times reported that violent crime in America has been decreasing for 40 years and is now at an all time low, here.

The effects of the failed and costly War on Drugs and its correlation to massive increases in the prison population are graphically illustrated:

Pro Publica has done some outstanding investigative reporting on America's Prison Industrial Complex.

The growth of the private detention industry has long been a subject of scrutiny. A recent eight-part series in the New Orleans Times-Picayune chronicled how more than half of Louisiana’s 40,000 inmates are housed in prisons run by sheriffs or private companies as part of a broader financial incentive scheme. The detention business goes beyond just criminal prisoners.

As a Huffington Post investigation pointed out last month, nearly half of all immigrant detainees are now held in privately run detention facilities. Just this week, the New York Times delved into lax oversight at industrial-sized but privately run halfway houses in New Jersey.

We’ve taken a look at some of the numbers associated with the billion-dollar and wide-ranging for-profit detention industry—and the two companies that dominate the market...

Two private corporations dominate the private Prison Industrial Complex, Corrections Corporation of America and The Geo Group Inc. They lard up political campaigns with special interest dough to get legislators to pass more insanely stupid laws for the exclusive benefit of prison profits. Only in America do we grow the prison system for private profits and only in America will politicians sell out their fellow citizens for a campaign contribution. If the Prison Industrial Complex isn't horrifying enough because it destroys lives and families, it's also extended to children. Yes, the prison operators want America's children.

The Other Prison Industrial Complex

The U.S. locks up children at more than six times the rate of all other developed nations. The over 60,000 average daily juvenile lockups, a figure estimated by the Annie E. Casey Foundation (AECF), are also disproportionately young people of color. With an average cost of $80,000 per year to lock up a child, the U.S. spends more than $5 billion annually on youth detention. On top of the cost, in its recent report No Place for Kids, the AECF presents evidence to show that youth incarceration does not reduce recidivism rates, does not benefit public safety and exposes those imprisoned to further abuse and violence.

  

But it's not just the politicians who are bribed by the Prison Industrial Complex, the graft and corruption has spread to the judicial system where judges are taking bribes to deliver child prison inmate 'customers' to private prison operators.

U.S. Judges Admit to Jailing Children for Money

Any nation that tolerates the Prison Industrial Complex is so morally defunct that such nations mirror Nazi Germany. Have we become Nazis? Except for those liberty activists who fight for civil liberties and justice, most of America is oblivious to the massive injustice within our criminal justice system.

But since America is a place that eagerly embraces murdering foreign citizens for defense contractor profits, putting Americans in prison for prison contractor profits is now accepted as routine standard operating procedure.  Such a society is doomed by its own unspeakable evil.