I was shocked to learn that our prison population is made up of 50% of people there serving time on drug possession cases or Felony DUI.
It's stupid that we're locking people up for things like this but it plays to the fears of the soccer moms who've been convinced that all druggies are targeting their children and that every guy who's had two beers is going to run into their suburban. I'm far from a liberal, but it's out of control the rate at which we lock up people in this country. We even threw Martha Stewart in jail, for Christ's sake! For a nation of supposedly "free" people we sure do have a lot of laws aimed at controlling every facet of people's lives. The statistics speak for themselves, we're infatuated with throwing people in jail for the most trivial "crimes" and the politicians eat it up because they can claim they were tough on crime again. We're all about law and order and damn the consequences. Heck, look at this thread, half of the folks on here are crying about us not locking enough people up despite the fact that we jail far more than any other nation out there.
The problem with locking up non violent offenders is that you usually take a person who's a productive member of society and instantly turn him into a welfare case. If the guy spends a year in jail for a DUI then he may be the best computer programmer in the world but that prison record is going to show up on any employment background check and he's now unemployable. You've taken a guy who had a productive career and ruined his life, now the government's got to support him and he's lucky if he doesn't turn into a real crook because it's the only way left. If he wasn't a crook when he went into prison it's pretty much guaranteed he will be when he gets out.
Everybody's pet peeves shouldn't be the basis for a new law. We criminalize too much. We've got too many laws on the books now and as mentioned before no one could possibly make it through a day without breaking several of them. There's something wrong with that and it needs to be corrected, but it won't as long as some pandering politician can get the vote of the terrified masses by promising to get "tough on crime" by throwing some pothead into prison or busting some harmless middle age guy for DUI. Drunks and potheads are much safer for the politicians and police to screw with than real criminals. It makes their arrest statistics look good without doing a damn thing to reduce real crime.
