Jail overcrowding; one of the biggest issues facing marijuana today

HIGH_TIMES_Mag HIGH TIMES Magazine

“The fact that you can get drugs in prison underscores the total failure of the war on drugs more than anything else that I can think of”

I follow High Times Magazine on Twitter and they twitted this earlier today.  I retweeted it because it is something i truly believe in and what my final project for two of my classes is on.

Are they right since you can get drugs in prison is the war on drugs failing?  Will it be easier to completely decriminalize marijuana so there will be fewer people overcrowding in prisons and fewer worries about marijuana coming into prison systems?  A very serious issue that needs to be brought to serious attention.

Statistically the number of arrests for Marijuana possession and sales has increased by 800 percent since 1990.  Since 1990, over 5.9 million Americans were arrested due to marijuana charges and that’s more Americans than the entire populations of the states of Alaska, Delaware, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming combined.

Roughly 88 percent were charged with use and or possession and a small 12 percent were charged with selling or growing.  In 2007,  nearly   782, 000 American were arrested on Marijuana charges with 60, 000 to 85, 000 of those arrested sentence to county jail or prison terms. The average cost for putting a man or woman in prison for year in 2005 was $23,876.

The prices for prison incarceration vary in different states and this number could have gone up since 2005 and gotten pricier since then as well.

If you do the math, 85,000 of those people who were arrested for use and possession and multiple the average cost of holding one person in prison, and that comes out to $2,029,460,000 dollars.  That’s 2 billion dollars of money that can be put toward hunting down actual drug rings, gang related crime, and other bigger offenses rape, murder, etc.

Just a small look at what jail overcrowding is doing in this country and how marijuana users are a huge part of this problem and need to be fixed sooner than later.

I will post my full project on the subject next when I finish it.

Reference for stats: LegalizationofMarijuana.Com: http://www.legalizationofmarijuana.com/index.html