[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
The issue is not just the judges it is the city and county attorneys too.
A caution: City attorneys deal with misdemeanors, county attorneys deal
with felonies.
If you are going to get mad, you have to include every one who has power to
make change in drug and gang cases.
Meth, Crack, Cocaine, Heroin.....I don't care what the drug is and where it
is being served there should be mandatory sentencing in those cases.
Well, this makes achieving prison time for the vicious felons we deal
with more difficult. So long as the space is taken up with guys
(usually) who are caught for using the drugs and pedaling small amounts,
there won't be space for the vicious felons in the pokey.
Also, you might want to look at the results of Judge Pam Alexander's
study of who gets time for what before you leap. According to the study,
people get more time for X amount of crack than for the same amount of
cocaine. It's the same drug, so the discrepancy is incomprehensible from
the viewpoint of dealing with crimes that make life miserable for all.
It also gives the advantage to the volume cocaine dealers, which does
not serve us well. Any changes to those laws have to go through the
legislature and the legie seems uninterested in making those changes.
Curiously, those charged with cocaine violations are much more often
Caucasian than those who are charged with crack violations. (There's a
guy out here every day on Lake St. who was caught with poundage of
cocaine. He didn't get much prison, if any. He's gone straighter. He's
Caucasian. There's many and many a guy on Lake St. who was caught with
small amounts of crack. They have mostly been recycled through the work
house and the prisons several times already and will no doubt do more
time in the future. They're African American.
You might also want to think about the Innocents Project from whence
young lawyers and almost-lawyers have, generally through DNA evidence
unavailable at conviction, gotten several people out of prison who were
wrongly convicted to decades of prison time.
You will also have to examine the prison system itself. Is it solely to
punish? Is it to hold people too vicious to be in the general
population? Is it to give felons time to consider their behavior and
learn how to behave differently? Is it revenge? Is it just meanness on
our parts?
As I follow specific felons through the repetitive cycle of
behavior/prison/release, it has become clear to me that we have no
shared understanding of what prison is for, how to use the time there to
society's advantage and the felons, and we wind up making the ties among
felons more important than the ties to the body politic. Thus, once an
outlaw, always an outlaw. So, the first time we pick up a kid for some
witless behavior with drugs in the middle of it, he/she's branded and we
repeat the cycle time and time again. Who was it said insanity is
repeating the same behavior over and over and expecting a different outcome?
WizardMarks, Central
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