An “In my opinion” column entitled “Is Pennsylvania leading the national race to be the world’s greatest prison state?” commences “In the category of imprisonment, the U.S. leads the world. Our commonwealth has shared in this title by growing our corrections budget every year. It’s apparent that our country is headed in the wrong direction if we are dependent on crime to help our local economies.”
It continues “ … Corrections has mushroomed to the third largest allocation in our state budget behind health care and education. Can we afford to keep being ‘tough on crime’? Isn’t it time to be ‘smart on crime’?
“The increase in prisoners is not an influx of new residents as our population has been relatively stagnant; it is an increase in long mandatory minimum sentences and technical parole violations for nonviolent offenders. The current methods of incarceration are ineffective and the majority of inmates who are released return to crime.” … (more)
WATCHDOG: Two wags of the tail. What is missing from this cogent presentation is that so many shouldn’t be there in the first place. They are victims of the War on Drugs.
We partake of drugs such as alcohol and tobacco and the relatively benign coffee, and go on with our lives. They smoke the relatively benign marijuana (far less dangerous than alcohol and tobacco and about equal to coffee) and go to prison.
By incarcerating the soft drug users, whose only crime is smoking a plant, we are creating criminals for the future. Prison is NOT a place place for pot smokers. It is just plain stupid. Politicians proclaim “hard on drug users!” “I’ll stop crime”, hard-headed speak for the masses. I’d like one time to hear someone say “crime is in existence here. Always has been and always will be as long as people exist on the earth. I will concentrate only on the worst of them, pre-meditated murder, crimes against children, rape and kidnapping.