The Shrine

Seems like a very good time to start a gang =)

Republican whiners wrote:"Among the inmates who could be eligible for early release under the Democrat plan include felons convicted of human trafficking, stalking, identity theft, violent child abuse and threatening to use a weapon of mass destruction," the Republican Caucus said in a written statement.

O RLY? Wouldn't you think the whole thing about "nonviolent criminals" would contradict that statement? Seriously..."threatening to use a weapon of mass destruction"? Anybody accused of that goes to GitMo straight away. Fucking grandstanding!

Here is a breakdown of our prison system:

Wikipedia wrote:

52%?!! RELEASE THE DRUG POPULATION!! The War on (some) Drugs is costing us BILLIONS!!!

I guess it is time to buy a gun.

Not really, Imakeholesinu. I agree with Sine. A lot of this is the result of silent-majority Republicans who love nothing better than to see anyone who's been accused of petty crimes locked up and hurt badly. Those silent-majority types literally have the cruelty of Morgan le Fay when it comes to this crap...they repeatedly call for throwing the book at anybody who dares to contradict the (still largely Republican, after the last seventy years) law of the land. Those folks want to HURT people - more so, in my experience, than the majority of these prisoners who might be released. The incarcerations involved are often not really that dangerous, if you're not a vicious, judgemental, cowardly stay-at-home mom who thinks that smoking pot once makes somebody a drug abuser and criminal and please for the love of God arrest this person before they rape me and my husband and children. Look at Sine's graph, this stuff really started spiking under Reagan (and his War on Inner Cities, more or less) on its way to a five-times rise in our prison population.

My guess is that the vast majority of people being let go are pot dealers, dumbass wannabe pot dealers, young minority kids who got caught doing crack, etc., etc. I know some folks like that down in the rougher neighborhood I lived in for awhile. They're not particularly upstanding, and they're not stone cold violent inhuman child molesting cocaine freebasing murderers either. They're just..kind of...fuckups.

Personally, I don't feel particularly frightened by it much. I just think it's going to be harder to go to jail in California over some really stupid bullshit. There are going to be some dangerous people who get let out, but - I hate to break it to people - there are already PLENTY of incredibly dangerous people all over California anyway. This is what happens when you have a political party whose unsustainable incarceration policies, at their core, are more about making silent-majority folks who can't manage their fears well feel safe at night rather than actually making people safer at night. I will admit to a certain amount of Schaedenfraude at thinking about the number of entitled, selfish silent-majority folks who I'm sure are losing sleep at night over the whole thing.

Actually, I'll put it this way. Yes, it's likely that some of the folks being let out are mildly to more-than-mildly dangerous. I just don't see them as terribly different from the majority of people walking around in, say, L.A., at any given time. I don't think this is going to change the makeup of the state very much, in fact I think the only people who are going to get really, genuinely scared about it are the silent-majority folks I was talking about. Which is good, because they've had it too good for too long anyway and that's why they institute jail policies like we have that ruin people's lives over minor offenses so soccer moms can be less scared and feel like badasses. I am of the opinion that it is a wonderful thing that those folks should actually have to face up to some of that now...though I suspect many of them will just start taking guns and going to town hall meetings and blaming things on everyone else and calling for, in some way shape or form, people to be hurt, which I find is at the cornerstone of their philosophies if you clear away all the surface crap.

Were the US a nation run by an enlightened class who had no ties to wealth; perhaps even if it were people like Obama; then, no doubt drugs would be legal.

The US is run by democracy, however, and that means the people who run the money and the propaganda machines are the ones who control the country with the argument that tens of millions of sheep who believe what they hear will agree with them. It's not like scientific tests haven't been done to prove that most people are easily persuaded to believe in things that don't make any sense at all.