commentaries

The answer is glaringly obvious. End the ridiculous war on drugs! Make drugs legal and cheap, and offer rehab services to those users who seek it. By doing this you instantly pull the teeth of a vast criminal supply network in America, you end the need of addicts to steal, prostitute themselves or worse to get the money to support their habit, and you allow those who needed to hide their problem to seek help legally and cheaply. It is a win-win-win situation as has been shown in countries such as the Netherlands, Portugal, and others. This ridiculous war on drugs has cost more in money and lives than drugs ever could.

Another Big Education moron lobbying for more money to flush down the drain by Big Education. So if we spent more money on education, the thugs roaming the streets of Minneapolis just go away I guess. Marxits just don't get it.

"We need to stop investing taxpayer dollars in failed policies and failed institutions and better focus investment in institutions..." - - - So if I'm reading this correctly, it's a "taxpayers" problem, that "taxpayers" need to fix. Somehow, I would have thought a parent or parents would be "somewhat" responsible.

It would actually be less costly to provide treatment and make-work jobs @ prevailing wages.

The University of Mary Washington is located in Fredericksburg, Va. I doubt that Prof. Rigelhaupt lives in a high crime rate area, like DC for example. Could he be a limousine liberal? My guess is yes.

By simply privatizing all prisons jobs would be created along with a never ending supply of losers to make a buck off of.

The criminal justice system in this country is a cancer that just keeps growing. It is a system that perpetuates its massiveness by stopping, ticketing, charging, plea bargaining, probating, and jailing citizens for petty crimes and misdemeanors. From harassing juveniles to non-stop ticketing for hundreds of traffic offenses, to the relentless parade of people charged with small amounts of drugs who are demanded to treatment, random urines, probation, fines, community service etc... It is a unrelenting cycle of putting more people into the system that then hires more people to deal with the people who are in the system then they have to keep the people coming into the system to justify all the people who now work for the system. It is the most twisted thing and it simply cannot be tolerated anymore because it goes beyond all sense of reason. Juveniles get caught smoking or drinking and they have to spend their entire high school years urinating in a cup because they are required to jump through one hoop after another to get off probation. Every aspect of the system requires a fee for every single service that is forced upon you in addition to the cost to taxpayers. The need for review of the effectiveness and cost of our criminal justice system is long overdue along with its sister chemical treatment programs especially for young people who have a relapse rate of 90-95%. It has become a travesty; and those who work in the system will not be the ones to advocate for reform because they work very hard to justify the need for their jobs.

I worked a quarter century in Corrections, both adult and juvenile. Want to save money while making our communities safer? Legalize drugs. Have the government make them, sell them, and tax them. Handle them just like we do liquor except give the government the monopoly for manufacturing and selling. Crime goes way down, gangs disperse, governmental income goes WAY up so that taxes can come down. Everybody wins, except for the bad guys. Prohibition did not work with liquor, nor has it worked with drugs. Recognize that fact so we can stop wasting billions on the silly War on Drugs and start making billions as the liquor industry now does. Dangers? Yes, but not nearly as dangerous as prohibition. Just do it.

Anyone notice that, as we privatize prisons, we incentivize incarcerating people? Putting more criminals behind bars equals more profits for these prisons and the corporations that run them, and they have lobbyists in Congress who make sure crime is punished to the max. Long story short, legalize drugs and abolish private prisons. How can we be the "land of the free" when we have more people in prison than even the most authoritarian of states?

That is the goal. A neverending circle of pure profit! GOP heaven.