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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
The state of California legalised recreational cannabis use in November 2016, and it will become legal state-wide on Monday. That means anyone 21 and older will be able to buy cannabis from a licensed store, known as a dispensary.
The resentencing provisions of Proposition 64, California's cannabis legalisation initiative, have been in effect since last year, said Eunisses Hernandez, a policy coordinator at the Drug Policy Alliance, a group working to end drug prohibition. But few people know about the resentencing provision, which applies to people who are currently imprisoned or out on parole, Hernandez told Al Jazeera.
Individuals who apply for resentencing may be released from prison or have the charge on their criminal record reduced. Felonies may be lowered to misdemeanours, misdemeanours to infractions, or infractions to an outright dismissal of charges.
Resentencing will likely affect thousands of lives, since at least 500,000 marijuana-related arrests have been recorded in California over the last decade, Hernandez said.
[...] Several groups in the US have urged authorities to include changes to drug-related criminal offences in their efforts to legalise recreational cannabis.
Proponents of cannabis legalisation feared that allowing people with past drug convictions to get out of jail or reduce their sentences would lower the chance that the laws would pass at all. "There was, in many cases, a reluctance to bring this up," he told Al Jazeera.
Today, opponents of resentencing provisions often argue that retrying these cases puts "a very, very large potential burden on the courts", Sterling said.
Law enforcement officers may also contend that a guilty plea to cannabis possession may follow the dropping of more serious charges, such as possession with the intent to distribute - "and so to make a blanket change without looking at all of the underlying facts of the arrest would mean that more serious offenders would have their records expunged", Sterling said.
Ultimately, Sterling said it is most important to make sure people who may be affected by a resentencing law are aware that the law exists in the first place.
"The key thing, I think, is the ability for people to re-enter the economy and society free of those encumbrances," he said. "We would also say they are eligible to vote, they are eligible for jury duty, that all of their civil rights are restored."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by MrGuy on Wednesday January 03 2018, @06:37PM (1 child)
Don't mistake "profitable" meaning "financial beneficial to a particular person" with "profitable" meaning "of net positive benefit to society."
The problem with private profit being considered an unqualified "good" (as some classical economists continue to argue) is that externalities are often not taken into account. For example, a manufacturing plant that is privately profitable to run but which causes massive mercury contamination of a nearby aquifer may be profitable to run if the we ignore the social cost of the pollution, but unprofitable if the owners of the plant were forced to pay the cost to control the pollution and/or compensate people who were adversely affected by the pollution. In my example, the assessment of the cost could be straightforward, but many externalities are not easy to with specificity link to specific owners or to easily quantify and assess the cost of.
More realistic example - in the US, roads are provided "for free" to all comers by the government, funded primarily by a tax on fuel. The fuel tax is not a great way to measure wear and tear - heavy vehicles inflict proportionally more wear than their fuel consumption would suggest compared to cars. Railroads are (or were at the time of my example) privately owned and maintained by the railroads. One of the reasons long-haul trucking came to dominate freight movement in the US at the expense of long-term rail shipment was this difference in cost - the need to maintain their tracks was a significant expense for railroads that trucks did not incur (in fact, given many trains were diesel, like trucks, mean that railroads ALSO contributed actively towards the maintenance of surface roads they never used via the fuel tax). Many assessments argue that rail freight is, on the whole, a cheaper way to ship goods long distances if these costs were all factored in. Is rail freight "unprofitable" or not?
You can define certainly define the word "profit" in a way that makes neither of these examples paradoxical to the notion that "profitable activities should occur, unprofitable ones should not." But it means considering something other than "what's reflected in dollar terms on the corporate balance sheet."
(Score: 2) by dry on Thursday January 04 2018, @02:49AM
Is the diesel sold to railways actually road taxed in the USA? Here in Canada, I assume it isn't considering that I can buy gas for my lawnmower (hard to find) that isn't road taxed as well as farmers buying gas/diesel that isn't road taxed. Generally it is dyed purple and the cops used to check for it when they used to do the defective vehicle roadblocks. Boat fuel is another one that doesn't have road taxes on it if you can find it.
I'd assume that railways buy diesel by the tanker truck full and shouldn't have any problem getting fuel without the road taxes.
Another cost issue with railways in the States, or perhaps some States, is having to pay property taxes on the railroad, with some jurisdictions having high taxes.