Jun
14
2010
Clear evidence of a nation that has gone stark staring mad
Posted by geoff in FAIL, Politics
As the CEPR report cited in the original post points out, the financial cost of this absurd policy is astronomical. “[A] reduction by one-half in the incarceration rate of non-violent offenders” would save U.S. state and local governments at least $14.8B/year, and would still leave the incarceration rate quite high in historical terms.
So what tipped the country into collective lunacy in 1980? Ronald Reagan? Or was he just a symptom?
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I’d seen figures before but this graph is… well… graphic. The trend is 30 years old, so two more questions spring to mind. How come we never hear much about it? Is anyone campaigning against it?
Isn’t that when the “war on drugs” really started taking off?
I’d wager many, many of those people in prison are there for relatively minor drug offences. Which is why people campaign against anti-drug laws; they’re not always just pro-drug, they’re anti-crazy.
You can see it in a smaller level down there in the 1920s-1940s. Prohibition kicked in in 1920. Then the mobs moved in and there was a *huge* boom in organised crime, which led to more criminals, which led to more people being arrested. By the time it was repealed in 1933, the mobs were still powerful as hell thanks to those 13 years.
I think that Meee is right. It started in the early 1970s with Nixon and the war on drugs. Reagan made it a lot worse. Somehow, it never seems to get through that prohibition is a support system for organized crime. In my more cynical moments I suspect that the organized crime lobby is a major reason that we haven’t repealed it.
As you said: stark staring mad.