SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Friday that he has directed his federal prosecutors to pursue the most severe penalties possible, including mandatory minimum sentences, in his first step toward a return to the war on drugs of the 1980s and 1990s that resulted in long sentences for many minority defendants and packed U.S. prisons.
[...] In the later years of the Obama administration, a bipartisan consensus emerged on Capitol Hill for sentencing reform legislation, which Sessions opposed and successfully worked to derail.
In a two-page memo to federal prosecutors across the country, Sessions overturned former attorney general Eric H. Holder's sweeping criminal charging policy that instructed his prosecutors to avoid charging certain defendants with offenses that would trigger long mandatory minimum sentences. In its place, Sessions told his more than 5,000 assistant U.S. attorneys to charge defendants with the most serious crimes, carrying the toughest penalties.
More at Washington Post, Fox News, Huffington Post, The Hill
Memorandum on Department Charging and Sentencing Policy - US Department of Justice PDF
(Score: 5, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Tuesday May 16 2017, @07:22AM (4 children)
I am totally pro-drug legalization and I barely even drink alcohol. Pot just makes me catatonic -- totally the opposite of fun. Never even had any of the hard stuff.
BUT, the drug war is massively expensive and massively useless. There isn't a single good thing about it unless you are a cop or own a prison. I would far rather see that money go to roads, parks, or hell -- you could pile it up, douse it in gasoline, and burn it and we'd still come out ahead because of the social costs of the drug war (creating poverty by making people unemployable).
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 16 2017, @12:27PM
The social cost is even higher. By making drugs illegal, they also get more expensive (demand and supply, economics 101), which means the addicts need more money to pay for it. More need of money combined with less ability to obtain it legally means more crime.
Of course if your goal is to fill up the prisons and increase police spending, you'll welcome the additional crime, as more criminals means more people in prison, and more crime means people are more likely to agree to more and better equipped police, as well as more permissions given to the police.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by fyngyrz on Tuesday May 16 2017, @12:57PM (2 children)
The fact is that the drug war single-handedly created a huge black market, and has been fundamentally responsible for very nearly 100% of the violence and corruption in the recreational drug sphere on every side. In addition, it is a major offense (in both senses of the word) against personal / consensual informed choice, which is to say it is an instance of antithesis of liberty, something I find repellent.
IMHO, if someone wants to eat massive amounts of junk food, climb Everest, race motorcycles, engage in boxing, ski, drink to excess, drug to excess, have unprotected sex, handle poisonous snakes, or otherwise engage in informed, personal / consensual risk-taking behavior (of which there is a very rich set to choose from), by all means, they should go right ahead. I may, or may not, be willing to assist if such choices result in unwanted outcomes.
It's long past time the drug war got shoved into a box labelled "really stupid ideas that did huge damage to society."
I think the government has two legitimate roles here:
Which brings up another huge governmental screwup:
"Informed", at least as the USG sees it, is a line in the sand drawn by age. This doesn't work for anything but rote legal reactions and political cover. It doesn't actually mean anyone is informed on the high side of it; and it doesn't actually mean that anyone isn't informed on the low side of it. If you want to find out of someone knows something, you need to test them to see if they do. That's why there's a driver's test. Can anyone imagine if the entire metric for driving were "okay, you're 16, here's the car keys, there's the highway."? Oy.
When serious consequences are at stake, using age as a yes/no discriminator is not just wrongheaded, it's foolish and dangerous. Bluntly, the "age line in the sand" is broken for the very purpose it is supposedly designed to achieve. It makes the legal process a little easier, and it lets politicians off the hook for actually, you know, doing their jobs.
Unfortunately, as near as I can tell, parental angst and control issues make this politically risky to do correctly, and US politicians won't do the right thing if they can do the safe thing instead (which in this case is nothing) WRT their phony-balony jobs. So we remain stuck with "broken" and probably will continue to be.
Welcome to the machine. You too can be a slave for private prisons. Would you like to know more?
Same here. In fact, the majority of "alcohol" I "drink" is wine in spaghetti sauce, where the actual alcohol has largely sublimated away. I like reality. I also like to put a tiny bit of whisky -- about a coke spoon's worth -- on the tip of my tongue every once in a while to enjoy the wonderfully rich scents and flavors... I've been working on the same 375 ml bottle of John Jacob for two years now, and it's still 1/3 full. Those two things describe my entire alcohol indulgence. So as you can see, a real "problem" drinker. <rolleyes>
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday May 16 2017, @10:13PM (1 child)
> shoved into a box labelled "really stupid ideas that did huge damage to society."
People have publicly admitted that disenfranchising millions of young poor/minorities (courtesy of uneven enforcement and sentencing) was both a goal and a success.
Is trampling the poor for political gain considered "huge societal damage", nowadays?
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Tuesday May 16 2017, @10:27PM
Yes. The rich make up a very small proportion of society, though they hold most of its wealth. Don't confuse wealth with people; people are what make up a society. All people. The drug war has hurt not just the poor, but the middle class as well, not to mention dealing damage to other country's societies, such as Mexico, Columbia, etc.
What people are you talking about here? The rhetoric I have heard from the sleaze-bags in government is that we are in the process of being saved from ourselves. Mustn't forget to mention "the children" here, either. You know, the ones they want to see born, but don't care if they get medical care or food. Those children.