People think it’s the politicians who are to blame for the problems of America. They are just the Clowns- it is the media who are the Ringmaster. This essay was written as a response to a Quillette article entitled The Conservative Case for Cannabis Legalization.
Good article. I’m particularly glad the author highlighted the likely cognitive damage caused by marijuana for younger people- it’s an aspect which is little discussed in the legacy media, and a real public health concern.
But it’s worth also noting it is simply untrue that marijuana possession significantly contributes to mass incarceration. Despite the high number of needless arrests each year, only a tiny fraction of individuals arrested for marijuana possession find themselves ultimately serving sentences for possession.
An estimated 40,000 people today are incarcerated for marijuana offenses even as: the overall legal cannabis industry is booming. Those companies need to help.
What percent of state prisoners are being held for marijuana possession only?
Answer: 0.1% of state prisoners are being held for marijuana possession only.
In total, one tenth of one percent (0.1%) of state prisoners were marijuana possession offenders with no prior sentences. For Federal prisoners (who represent 13 percent of the total prison population in the U.S.):
About half (51%) had a drug offense as the most serious offense in 2009.
99.8 % of Federal prisoners sentenced for drug offenses were incarcerated for drug trafficking.
Simply stated, there are very few people in state or Federal prison for marijuana-related crimes.
And it’s a pattern which can be found as early as 1997. From another source, published in 2005:
In 1997, the year for which the most recent data are available, only 1.6 percent of State inmates were in prison for offenses that involved only marijuana; and less than 1 percent of all State inmates had been convicted under a charge of only marijuana possession. Of these inmates convicted for only marijuana possession, just 0.3 percent were first-time offenders. At the Federal level, of the drug defendants sentenced for marijuana crimes in 2001, the overwhelming majority were convicted for trafficking; only 2.3 percent (186 individuals) were sentenced for simple possession; and of the 174 individuals for whom sentencing information is known, only 63 were imprisoned. The expanding number of drug courts have helped ensure that the vast majority of those arrested only for possessing and using drugs are sentenced to mandatory treatment under close monitoring rather than imprisonment.
The vast majority of people sentenced for prison terms on drug-related charges were imprisoned for trafficking. Racial disparities can also be traced to the police targeting of areas where inter-gang violence related to drug trafficking were particularly high. Simply put, if you were a dealer in suburbia where violence was non-existent, then you had to be particularly unlucky to find yourself on the receiving end of a drug sentence, because resources simply weren’t being targeted your way.
This is not to say that American Criminal Justice wasn’t a complete mess during this period. There were plenty of ways in which the drug policy could have been quickly reformed to reduce harm and drastically reduce the number of people serving prison sentences at the taxpayers expense. First and foremost, testing for psychopathy and Dark Triad type personalities during the sentencing phase of the court process, could have streamed off those very likely to commit violent crimes for longer sentences, with shorter disruption sentences (6 months to 2 years) applied to those very unlikely to commit violent crimes.
Second, traffickers with a lack of potential for violent crime could have alternatively been subject to increasingly punitive fines- making at least $1,000 a day they could have afforded them- also mitigating the need to raise municipal funding through fines and summons, which is as much as 40% of all municipal funding in many jurisdictions, in what effectively a tax, or government rent-seeking, on the poor.
But perhaps the greatest tragedy about his period was the complete failure to recognise the insane incentives of drug dealing, or the extent to which gang grooming played a role in gang involvement. There was an unspoken assumption built into drug strategy that the small numbers of bad kids would soon be exhausted. Instead America got a conveyor belt, and the system which operated during this era literally guaranteed that for every young man convicted for drug trafficking, another teenage boy would be groomed by gangs to take his place.
By imposing ever escalating fines on the 80% of drug traffickers with little potential for violence and keeping them in circulation, American Law Enforcement could have built a far better picture of the supply and logistics of the drug trade, whilst simultaneously ensuring that the next generation of young men were never exposed to this corrosive trade.
Yes, there would have been casualties caused by the recently released offending, because even non-violent types have the potential to kill in the wrong circumstances. It would also been completely unworkable from the point of view of political expediency back then- with legacy media playing its omnipresent role of assigning blame and perennially harming American society. But it would have been the moral thing to do back then, just as it is the moral action right now.
For decades, America has been under the thrall of media elites- to the extent that they are the ones who make and inform policy. One only has to look to the role media has played in the pandemic to ascertain this fact- with States with high levels of Fox viewership pursuing one COVID policy, and States with viewership dominated by the rest of the media landscape opting for a policy which is diametrically opposed. Neither side is correct and both are completely insane.
And media was at the root of the drive for Mass Incarceration, just as now they are the cheerleaders for progressive prosecutorial misconduct which is already fomenting a return to eighties levels of violent crime. If the case of Tony Timpa, a young white man who died in Texas circumstances almost identical to George Floyd had been reported at a national level, then it is highly unlikely George Floyd would have ever died in the circumstances he did. And for every African American death at the hands of police officers, there have been almost identical deaths of white people.
America needs to wake up to the harms its media is doing to the country, to its people and to its young. America has become like the medieval man with a devil whispering on one shoulder, an angel on the other- and the identity of both determined by where you happen to fall on the political spectrum.
This has to stop. If you can’t see the way in which media has encouraged and is encouraging American Criminal Justice to swing violently like a pendulous scythe from one extreme to the other, with barely a pause in the middle where sane, responsible and safe Criminal Justice cowers from the blade, then at least look to your past to see the damage done to entire generations by a privileged media class.
You may blame Bill or Hilary Clinton for Mass Incarceration. That would be unfair. Long before either of them ever arrived on scene, politicians had become clowns performing for the Circus. And it was the media who were the Ringmasters, the P. T. Barnum’s of this toxic landscape. Tune out and watch alternative media sources, if you value your country and your sanity.
You could start with Krystal and Saagar’s Breaking Points on YouTube- they may not always be right, you may find yourself completely disagreeing with them- but at least they won’t surreptitiously slip poison into your ear, making you hate people with which you should only politely disagree.
Hello Mr. Johansen. I offer one of my favorite quotes from the author Michael Crichton:
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
As a scientist, I find this true when I read most articles on a subject area I know quite a bit about.
I try to keep this in mind when I read about things I know very little about (which is most things).
My question for you is, on other than a personal level (not taking anything media article at face value) HOW do we stop it?
Mr. Johansen: I encountered you via your comment at the June 21 Tocqueville piece at Quillette. I am here simply to alert you that it is "toe the line," not "tow the line."
Hello Mr. Johansen. I offer one of my favorite quotes from the author Michael Crichton:
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
As a scientist, I find this true when I read most articles on a subject area I know quite a bit about.
I try to keep this in mind when I read about things I know very little about (which is most things).
My question for you is, on other than a personal level (not taking anything media article at face value) HOW do we stop it?
Best wishes,
Jeff
Mr. Johansen: I encountered you via your comment at the June 21 Tocqueville piece at Quillette. I am here simply to alert you that it is "toe the line," not "tow the line."
Troubling too is the fact that crime is now a for-profit business in the US -- Prisons-R-us Inc. wants as many people as possible imprisoned.