Newsgroups: talk.politics.drugs
From: [gal 2] at [kimbark.uchicago.edu] (Jacob Galley)
Subject: Investor's Business Daily: "3 Strikes" a bad idea
Date: Mon, 7 Mar 1994 18:07:19 GMT


That's the gist of the front page story in today's _Investor's
Business Daily_.  What caught my eye is the pie charts:

DRUG RAP
Percentage of state prison inmates, by type of crime

1991	Violent		46.6%
	Property	24.8
	DRUGS		21.3	[in bold letters!]
	Public order	 6.9
	Other		 0.4	[fraud? white collar crime?]

1986	Violent		54.6%
	Property	31.0
	DRUGS		 8.6
	Public order	 5.2
	Other		 0.7

I don't feel like typing the whole thing in, but here's a quote:

"One of the proposals most troubling to critics is a section of the
Senate-passed crime bill authored by Sen. Phil Gramm that counts
felony drug offenses as strikes toward automatic life imprisonment.

"Under the Gramm amendment, a person convicted of three separate
offenses involving possession of 5.1 grams of crack cocaine---the
weight of two pennies---would spend the rest of his life in prison
without the possibility of parole.

"Critics liken Gramm's proposal to the mandatory minimum sentencing
schemes that were developed for drug cases in the late 1980s.  Many
criminologists have condemned such measures, arguing that they have
resulted in the allocation of scarce prison space to low-grade,
nonviolent offenders."

Drug crimes are not the main thrust of the whole article.  It focuses
on cost-effectiveness and long-term impacts of all of these
politicians getting tough on crime.

Check it out.

Jake.
-- 
Philosophers cannot purely and simply forget what psychology, sociology, ethno-
graphy, history and psychiatry have taught us about the conditioning of human
behavior. It would be a very romantic way of showing one's love for reason to
base its reign on the disavowal of acquired knowledge.	     <-- Merleau-Ponty