¶ … Police Courts and Corrections
According to Merrill and Fox (1999) the total impact of substance abuse on Federal entitlement programs is more than $77 billion. This constitutes in excess of $66 billion directly associated with substance abuse. Further, the amount of taxpayer dollars spent on substance abuse would accounts for nearly 10% of total Federal spending (Merrill and Fox, 1999). The cost of drug use affects the entire criminal justice system, overburdening current resources at each stage of the arrest, adjudication, incarceration, and post-release supervision process (National Drug Threat Assessment, 2010).
Clearly, police are not equipped to "fight crime" as they are legislatively required to do. Further, the conflicts between state and federal law enforcement components are an unnecessary impedance to effective law enforcement efforts. The importance of effecting change through the various state legislatures, as well as compelling the Federal government to change certain laws according to public desire may help assuage the effects of differing laws governing state and Federal mandates. As previously mentioned, one such change that could effectively reduce the workload of state and Federal police is the eradication of marijuana restrictions in America. There simply are no justifiable reasons to continue restricting marijuana in the United States.
Consequently, I propose legislatively streamlining state and federal laws governing the possession and use of marijuana. Police should not be responsible for enforcing laws that are specifically designed to curb what so many individuals, regardless of legality, desire.
The war on drugs has been an utter failure by all measures. The effects that the war on drugs has had on America's citizens, prisons, and finances are devastating. With nearly millions of Americans reporting some drug use in the prior year, it is clear that government should not attempt to regulate that which so many people in the United States choose to do. With both alcohol and cigarette related deaths calculated to be in excess of hundreds of thousands of deaths every year, it is time that American legislators develop workable solutions to address drug use in America. The authority of the legal system and that of the legislative process is severely undermined by attempts to criminalize some drugs, but not others, such as alcohol, cigarettes, and caffeine. Degenhardt et al. (2008, pg. 1065) observe that "Globally, drug use is not distributed evenly and is not simply related to drug policy, since countries with stringent user-level illegal drug policies did not have lower levels of use than countries with liberal ones."
In 2007, there were 1,841,182 drug law violation arrests, representing an increase of 460.2% since 1973. However, by 2009, arrests for drug law violations decreased by 2.3% to 1,663,582 (2007 Crime in the United States, 2008). However, there were 1,427,494 arrests for alcohol-related violations in 2007. Legislators and other politically minded individuals must reconsider the impact that criminalization of marijuana has on our police forces, on our court systems, and, perhaps most importantly, on our correctional facilities. We can no longer continue to fight a "war" that so many of our citizens wage against.
MacCoun and Reuter (2001) found that, in reviewing the impacts of decriminalization efforts in the Netherlands, United States, Australia and Italy, decriminalization appears to warrant slight, though positive, impacts. The primary benefit in decriminalization efforts MacCoun and Reuter (2001) suggest is the decreased pressure on the criminal justice system components; from law enforcement efforts and prosecutorial costs associated with trials, as well as a decreased burden on correctional facilities.
Clearly, the war on drugs has been costly and, by significant measures, a dismal failure. The costs associated with fighting the "war on drugs" exceed $46 billion per year (National Drug Control Strategy, 2001). With the astronomical costs associated with identifying, arresting, prosecuting, and incarcerating individuals for drug related offenses, along with a struggling economy and an overall frustration in the criminal justice system, it seems incumbent upon legislators, regardless of political affiliation, to begin, in earnest, studying alternative methods to address the problems involved with drug addiction.
The commonly leveraged claim by those opposing all forms of drug legalization, namely that decriminalizing drugs will have adverse societal impacts and create more problems with drug addiction, is largely marginalized by Portugal's decriminalization efforts. Further, the "war on drugs" undermines respect for law enforcement efforts. The effect of decriminalization, beyond that of simple reduction in overall drug use, can actually help alleviate the ancillary social problems such as reduction in
Classification in Prison Classification Systems Classification systems aid in the minimization of the upheaval of prison violence, institutional delinquency, and break out situations. During the past several years, professionals in prisons and those that are employed in correctional systems have worked unremittingly in order for them to improvise their recent approaches in the classification of offenders i.e. In accordance with work, supervision, and programming needs. The process of classification takes place in
There are also theories on protective factors such as social control theory, which suggests that, absent social control force coming from the individual's bonds to community members (family, peers, school), youth will commit delinquent behavior naturally. And social capital theory argues "that the community can be strengthened by investing more in social networks, communication, and an exchange of resources" (Noyori-Corbett & Moon, 2010, p. 254). A combination and an
She answered that no one had condemned her. Jesus then said to her, "Then neither do I condemn you," Jesus declared. "Go now and leave your life of sin" (John 8:11). Because the woman was not stoned in the end, many interpret it to mean that Jesus changed Mosaic law and then this argument is extended to capital punishment in general. However, Jesus still left the opportunity for her to
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