Alabama suffers crime because of drugs, it punishes people because of drugs, it builds billion dollar prisons and signs billion dollar prison healthcare deals because its justice system is overrun by the consequences of drugs. It forces people to spend lifetimes in prison because of drugs, it uses the presence of drugs as an excuse to put addicts back inside, and if it put a fraction of the effort into rehabilitation it would save more people, more money and more families.
It’s just that they don’t mean “crime” so much as “criminals” and then proceed to define “criminals” as “unpaid laborers” (aka slaves).
And the concept that Alabama is tough on its slaves is not a new one.
Don’t let anyone confuse you, almost anytime someone says they’re “tough on crime,” what they mean is that they’re “tough on criminals and have an extra inky ‘criminal’ stamp.”
Batman is good because he’d be happy to hang up his cape because Gotham was successfully cleaned up. ACAB because if arrest numbers start going down, then they have to invent more criminals.
The vast majority of those drug prisoners are minorities. They are now required to work for little or no pay with no rights or protections. The state has their slaves back. This is working as intended.
Legalize drugs and addictions will go down, and the prices will plummet. The hard drugs will get much softer as well. Alcohol, Prohibition taught us this much. Who drinks moonshine these days? Nobody I’ve ever heard of. They sip a beer while watching the football game.
Addiction might go down, it might go up, but crime will definitely go down, and accidental overdose deaths will basically be eliminated.
Addiction should go down since legalizing the drugs would make room for less potent forms of the drugs. So something like cocaine could be replaced with coca leaf tea, etc. It doesn’t completely eliminate it, but it ought to bring it way down.
I don’t disagree, it ‘ought to’, but my point is simply that even if it doesn’t the benefits of legalization to both the addicted community and society in general are more than enough to justify legalization.
Ah, good point
I doubt a “less potent form of drugs” will happen exactly as you imagine. Drug potency has skyrocketed because logistically it’s easier to smuggle smaller quantities of a high potency substance. I personally think we would see a resurgence of drugs and doses of what people were previously doing before importing them got so difficult. What would be interesting though would seeing if any new analogs could be discovered with shorter term effects especially in the world of stimulants.
Right, exactly. So if it was legal, then the potency should be able to drop because you don’t have to smuggle it anymore. Since it would no longer be illegal and you no longer have to smuggle it in, then the space could be used for the less potent forms instead of the tiny spaces for more potent forms we have now.
Yes but who will do the prison slave labor if not the drug addicts?
https://lemdro.id/comment/5959283
Another commenter said that unironically, how tf do these people sleep at night lol
I would kill myself if I was to be locked up in Alabama. It’s one of the most barbaric prison systems in the USA. And while there may be worse in other countries, the USA prison system is very awful.
Compare it to that mass shooter who has what amounts to an apartment in another country (I think Nordic). Was posted on Lemmy a few weeks ago.
I just can’t behind this 'let’s go easy on drug users and drug sellers" mentality. I’m in California, and I swear the whole drug use and homeless crisis is getting worse, because we aren’t really punishing drug users. We’re just leaving them alone,…meanwhile, they’re robbing stores, building homeless camps where they can use drugs…etc…it’s just crazy. Look at places like Kensington in Philly…where it’s literally zombies walking around half dead…and no one seems to care.
It’s really out of control. Just last week I was in my Uber to work and had to see an encampment of the most destitute people in the city forced to live on the street because a bunch of NIMBYs don’t want shelters near them (they wanted to build one near my condo building and you’d better believe I gave them a piece of my mind about letting a bunch of drug addicts moving into real buildings in my neighborhood). It’s horrible the way they turn to drugs because if they’re going to die on the streets anyway they might add well die high. If we just arrest them all then at least they can contribute to the economy by providing free labor for a private prison! Anyway, the sight of those people made me vomit right there in the Uber. I’d rather have to pay the cleaning fee than walk the three blocks to work and actually have to SMELL those people!
“Homeless people stinky winky ewwww therefore they should be slaves”
“Homeless people are on drugs and alcohol, but we should just have sympathy for them because it’s not their fault.”
Nah fuck your sympathy, just mind your god damn business.
Sure, I’ll mind my own business… if those same homeless people will stop coming up to me asking for money, stop using drugs around my work, stop drinking alcohol and yelling at people, and stop shitting and pissing on the building I work at.
This is ridiculous. Spotted the liberal.
Drug use is often just a symptom of self medication for mental health disorders (obviously not always). Punishing people and then pushing them back out to the community clearly doesn’t work.
So perhaps look at addressing the cause rather than the symptoms.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The Prison Policy Initiative last week issued a national report about this very topic, saying cops, lawmakers, even family members worried about the addictions of their loved ones, often believe a stint in jail might be the thing that saves their sons or daughters or fathers or mothers.
The inability to pay drug debts leads to beatings, kidnappings, stabbings, sexual abuse, and homicides.”
People are attacked, like a Bibb Correctional Facility prisoner cited by the feds, who was stabbed as he was sleeping, over and over again, by a man who said the victim owed him money for drugs, so he “got it in blood.”
Like a man at Draper prison, also cited by DOJ, who blacked out on meth, and realized only after he woke up that he had been raped.
But few things come at a cost as substantial as a stint in Alabama prisons, where paroles have been nearly stopped, where violence is a constant, where lives are destroyed and redemption denied.
This project was completed with the support of a grant from Columbia University’s Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights in conjunction with Arnold Ventures.
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