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. As our prisons rapidly fill to bursting, rapists and murderers are being given early release to make room for no parole drug offenders. 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. The Consequences of Mandatory Minimums, Federal Judicial Center Report, 1994. 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. Substance Abuse and America's Prison Population, Forward by Joseph Califano. 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.