Marijuana as a Gift from Mother Earth Essay

According to Bernie Sanders, “It is time to tax and regulate marijuana like alcohol. It is time to end the arrest of so many people and the destruction of so many lives for possessing marijuana”. Cannabis is considered to be an illegal drug but is used for medical purpose. 587,700 people were arrested for marijuana in 2016. More people always get arrested for marijuana than other crimes like rape, murder, or robbery.

In America there are a lot of problems, ranging from violence to obesity. A growing concern of many Americans is the drug “epidemic” with the growth of the war on drugs. Marijuana, throughout history, has been demonized and illegalized, however now a newfound acceptance of the drug is growing rapidly with some states fully legalizing the drug recreationally, and others medically.

The criminal justice system in the United States promotes the mass incarceration of blacks can be seen through the high number of African-Americans going to jail for drugs compared to any other race. According to www.naacp.org “about 14 million Whites and 2.6 million African Americans report using an illicit drug”; if someone was to calculate this that means five times as many Whites are using drugs as African Americans.

“The United States has 5 percent of the world’s population, but 25 percent of its prisoners. The cost of housing all those inmates: $80 billion a year” (Whitaker, 2016). The United States (U.S.) has been fighting an unwinnable war for the past thirty years. The U.S. government and the War on Drugs has disproportionately impacted African Americans and the prison population has quadrupled over the last thirty years. The U.S Government polices of the war on drugs have contributed to the mass incarceration of African American males due to sentencing and race disparities, over-policing, and anti-drug policies.

The War on Drugs is one cause for the mass incarceration that has become apparent within the United States. This refers to a drastic amount of people being imprisoned for mainly non-violent crime (“Mass Incarceration” 2016). In addition to people who are not an immediate threat to society being locked up for a substantial duration of time, the economic consequences are costing states and taxpayers millions of dollars. Specifically, every one in five people incarcerated is in prison due to some

The “War on Drugs” established that the impact of incarceration would be used as a weapon to combat the illegal drug problem in this country. Unfortunately, this war against drugs has fallen disproportionately on black Americans. “Blacks constitute 62.6% of all drug offenders admitted to state prisons in 1996, whereas whites constituted 36.7%. The drug offender admissions rate for black men ranges from 60 to an astonishing 1,146 per 100,000 black men. In contrast, the white rate begins at 6 and rises no higher than 139 per 100,000 white men. Drug offenses accounted for nearly two out of five of all black admissions to state prisons (Human Rights Watch, 2000).” The disproportionate rates at which black drug offenders are sent to prison originate in racially disproportionate rates of arrest.

The United States incarcerates more people, per capita, than any other nation in the entire world. State and local prisons and jails account for about 80% of incarcerations. Although crime rates have decreased since the 1990s, incarceration rates have soared. According to a recent Prison Policy Initiative publication, approximately 2.3 million people are currently “locked up” in the United States. Of these 2.3 million people, 1 in 5 are locked up for a drug related offense. Statistics show that prisoners and felons imprisoned for drug related crimes are disproportionately Black and Hispanic. The mass incarceration issue in the United States derives from the many arrests associated with these “offenses” regarding drugs and the war on drugs.

There are countless amounts of man hours spent on the surveilling, apprehension and incarceration of marijuana offenders. Vast amounts of people end up incarcerated, who are not only not contributing to society, in

Even though drug laws are shown to be neutral and have no targeted audience, it can be implied that the War on Drugs was set in place to have Blacks arrested at an alarming rate to. African-Americans also have a disproportionately high

As agreed by Prisons: Problems and Prospects Prisons and the War on Drugs, “incarceration rates for murderers, robbers, and burglars have remained steady over the years, but the number of drug offenders who have been imprisoned has steadily escalated”. The “war on drugs” has, for the most part, added to prison overcrowding. However, it has particularly extended the degree of minorities who are sent to prison. Further readings by Nathan James (2016), “mandatory minimum penalties have contributed to the growing federal prison population”. In addition, this report also added some alternative to this development problem, “Even if Congress chooses not to repeal any mandatory minimum sentences, policymakers could review current mandatory minimum penalties to ensure that they are (1) not excessively severe, (2) narrowly tailored to apply only to those offenders who warrant such punishment, and (3) applied consistently” (James, 2016). “(1) Today narcotics offenders occupy 61% of the beds in federal prisons. (2) Meanwhile, 1 in 7 state facilities continues to operate beyond capacity. (3) Ohio leads the pack with a stunning 182% of capacity” (Smolowe, 1994).

“There is an undoubted race element, too. In 2010, black people were five times more likely to be incarcerated, and those figures are unlikely to have improved since then” (Holder).The war on drugs have affected mostly poor black communities of color even though black people are just as likely as whites to sell and use illegal drugs.

One of the largest factors that has contributed to the high numbers of the prison populations and the racial disparities of the criminal justice system has been the “war on drugs”.

We must enact policies that downscale the prison population. The best approach is to shift resources away from the incarceration and punishment of certain inmate categories, such as nonviolent drug offenders, investing instead in their rehabilitation. Though correction systems have historically favored punishment over ‘softer’ rehabilitation, most nonviolent, drug-related offenders would benefit more from rehabilitation than incarceration. Today, in great part as a consequence of the War on Drugs, our prisons house over half a million drug offenders, representing over one-half of the federal inmate population in the United States, an increase of 790 percent since 1980. It is time for new leadership on the War on Drugs which has cost billions of dollars and has caused the endangerment of inmates’ and correctional officers’ lives due to mass incarceration. Do we wish to continue being the most punitive developed country in the world? Instead of implementing mandatory

The Author in this article is discussing the alarming truth that more people have been arrested for small amounts of marijuana this year compared to those who have committed serious violent crimes last year. The author also argues that an excessive number of African Americans have been arrested for marijuana use similar to whites but are prosecuted far more frequently.

Today in the United States a land that claims to be the freest nation on the face of the Earth more people will wake up inside of a federal/state prison or a county jail cell than in any other country on the planet. As of 2012 this figure was a staggering 2,228,400 (jail 744,500; prison 1,483,900) add in to this the additional sum of just over 5 million people on parole (851,200) and probation (3,942,800) giving us a grand total of over 7 million citizens under some level of Federal or State supervision (Glaze and Herberman). This is up from only 1,840,421 in 1980 a percentage increase of 281.56% (Glaze and Herberman). As of 2012 over half of the inmates in the federal prison system (50.6%) were incarcerated for drug charges (Caron and Golinelli) while according to 2011 statistics just under 17% of state prisoners were locked away for offenses related to illegal substances (Carson and Sabol). The cost of maintaining this level of incarceration is in all honesty a tremendous burden upon both our justice system and our tax base. If you were to go to the website www.drugsense.org you would see their drug war clock which increases by $500 every second based upon the National Drug Control Policy’s 2010 statistics (Drugsense.org). The country needs to make serious changes in order to alleviate this Promethean like burden that has been placed on our tax payers and our infrastructure. Our system desperately needs reform in order to rescue society from these metaphorical