At the present rate of incarceration, this number will be one out of four alarmingly soon. We are losing an entire generation of young people. The average sentence for a first time, non-violent drug offender is longer than the average sentence for rape, child molestation, bank robbery or manslaughter. While law enforcement continues to go after relatively easy drug violation arrests, every major city in this country has a record number of unsolved homicides. This is roughly a fifty to one ratio.
Alcohol alone is involved in seven times more violent crimes than all illegal substances combined.
Yet our Government continues to hugely subsidize alcohol and tobacco, while demonizing those who would exercise a different choice. It's been empirically shown that education and treatment is seven times more cost effective than arrest and incarceration for substance addiction, yet we continue to spend more tax dollars on prisons than treatment. In this 'Land of Liberty', we spend more money on prisons than on schools. We are clearly addicted to mass punishment of consensual 'crimes' on a staggering scale. The sheer magnitude of all the human misery generated in our government's war on it's own people is truly terrifying.