Pubdate: Mon, 08 Sep 2014
Source: Daily Times (Primos, PA)
Copyright: 2014 The Daily Times
Contact:  http://www.delcotimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1284
Author: Chuck Mankin
Page: 21

WE'RE NOT SERIOUS ABOUT THE WAR ON DRUGS

To the Times: We have the war on drugs, the war on crime, and even 
the war on hunger now. The sad fact is that the war is designed just 
like the wars against our foreign enemies.

These wars are actually a war against empty pockets for the folks in 
charge. We have had a huge war on drugs for years now, yet for some 
reason we seem to have a worse drug problem than ever. Why, you may 
ask? Because we aren't serious about the consequences.

We work a fine balancing act between making the public feel good 
about our efforts with stiff sentences for the crime and allowing the 
offenders back out after they have supposedly learned their lesson. 
The reality is that locking these folks up is OK for a period of time 
in which the system can get money from them, they can pay off some of 
their fines by working in the prison, they and/or their families pay 
into the commissary at the prison to get them highly overpriced comfort food.

Plus their family visits require more staff so we can hire more folks 
to work the prison and tempt them with a little overtime. Once we 
have extracted some money for the system from this venue we release 
them back into the system. Probably into probation and parole, where 
we can extract more money from them and where we can justify more 
salaries for folks to monitor them.

Of course we gave them no real education or rehabilitation in prison, 
so guess what? They once again find themselves on the street with no 
real job, no prospects of a normal crime-free life, so they go right 
back to dealing and using. Because this results in still having drugs 
on the street we have the justification not only for having police on 
the streets but also for specialized teams trained for undercover 
narcotics and for others to conduct raids on dealers' stash houses. 
Once again this allows us to justify bigger budgets and to hire more folks.

I will close by saying that I am the son of a career law enforcement 
officer and have numerous friends in law enforcement so I am not 
knocking them one bit here. I am merely showing folks the overall 
reasons that the administration fails to get really tough on drugs or 
many other crimes like it certainly could and like so many other countries do.

CHUCK MANKIN

Smyrna, DE
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom