Why do so many folks use "overcrowding" as a rationale for keeping innocent people out of prison? Is that really the best reason you can come up with? If there was room for them, would it be fine? Would you legalize legitimate crimes because jail was full?
Overcrowding is the most tangible effect the voting public cares about, because everyone understands there are limited resources and at some point you have to make a decision who you want to keep in jail and who you don't.
I would say most people really don't care if an innocent person is in jail. But they do care if someone they consider a threat is let out because someone they don't consider a threat is taking up a spot.
Remember you're not dealing with rational beings, you're dealing with voters.
Of all the rationales, that's a poor one. How about:
- Forcing it onto the black market makes producing marijuana the most profitable use of lots of land that would otherwise be used for non-crime related agriculture.
- Locks up lots of people for non-violent offenses, ruining lives.
- Deprives the state of Billions of dollars in tax revenue
- Wastes billions on the nearly impossible task of enforcement
- Leads to US military intervention all over central and south america, which leads to puppet regimes, corruption, and tremendous amounts of human suffering.
- Marijuana proceeds fuel the expansion of criminal orgs that also practice human trafficking and import harder drugs. Legalization will destroy many of these organizations.
- Promotes the emphasis on alcohol as the recreational drug of choice in America, when in fact Marijuana generally has fewer adverse side effects.
The only reason that ultimately matters is that poking smot is not wrong, and putting innocent people in jail is. All that other stuff is incidental.
If it helps the cause, then use it, but I think most of it just confuses the issue, and opens it up to more fallacious counter-arguments. If we argue that certain unethical things should be stopped because they are impractical, then what do we say about the ones that are practical?
You want reasons it might be practical to imprison innocent people? Homelessness, insanity, youth, unpopular opinions, unpopular religion, guilty friends or relatives, wrong place at the wrong time, looking suspicious, bad taste, ugly, body odor, to name a few.
Marijuana proceeds fuel the expansion of criminal orgs that also practice human trafficking and import harder drugs. Legalization will destroy many of these organizations.
will it really destroy them? it seems like they will be able to provide the same product for a much cheaper price because it will not be taxed.
i don't know much about this proposition, but would it still be considered illegal to be in possession of marijuana not sold/taxed by authorized dealers? would anyone really be able to tell whether a person is in possession of marijuana that came from an authorized dealer or from a gang member?
A commonly cited estimate is that fully half of the income of the Mexican drug cartels comes from marijuana. If you deprive them of that revenue they won't go away, but their influence will surely be substantially weakened.
Imagine if marijuana were farmed using truly modern big-agricultural techniques. The price would be significantly lower, so even if you added on a nice profit for the company and a tax it would likely still be cheaper and significantly higher quality than black market product.
Well they are not technically innocent are they? If marijuana possession is illegal and they got caught with it, then they broke the law. You can say that the law is unjust of course, but if the law is on the books, they are not innocent of it.
Overcrowding can be a good argument because it basically argues that whatever social ill the marijuana prohibition aims to cure is not worth the cost of keeping all these people in jail.
I'd guess because many people opposed to marijuana legalization are also frequent complainers about their taxes going to 3-square-meal-a-day criminals in prison. Inform them that a huge portion of people in prison are there just for having pot, and taking them out would save them tax dollars and better the economy, and you may convince them to help legalize it.
