[Vision2020] Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman: Prison & The Poor

Fri Aug 18 10:36:22 PDT 2006

Roger et. al.

Well, of course in many cases our justice system does respect the rights of
the accused, but sometimes not sufficiently.  Certainly a better system of
legal representation for the accused when they cannot afford the high costs
of attorneys is critical.  It is one reason the prison population is slanted
toward the poor, among many.  The well off get the best representation.  The
poor are lucky to receive a good defense in court.  Even in some death
penalty cases in the USA there has been a weak legal defense from court
appointed attorneys, offered as a reason for appeals.

Even if we discover the confession in the Jon Benet case is false, there is
no doubt that the media sometimes approaches a suspect as though they are
guilty, with coverage that can ruin an innocent person's life, such as what
happened to Richard Jewel, the man falsely fingered for the Atlanta
Olympic bombing in 1996.  The media has for years implicated Jon Benet's
parents in her death, when the case is still open.  The only reason this
case is in the media so prominently is because the image of Jon Benet sells
advertising with the coverage.

Of course it is well known that a high percentage of the prison population
is related to controlled substance crime and the so called "War On Drugs,"
which many believe is a tremendous waste of the public tax dollar given the
limited success, high costs of incarceration, the burden on the courts and
law enforcement, the erosion of civil rights to pursue the " war," while
targeting the poor, often minorities, disproportionately.  Conservative
thinkers such as William F. Buckley Jr. and Milton Friedman have opposed the
"War On Drugs."

I heard Nobel laureate Milton Friedman being interviewed recently, and he
made the obvious point that any of the arguments in favor of the criminal
approach to stopping drug use apply with even greater force when examining
the damage from tobacco and alcohol use, which are connected to many times
the number deaths from medical causes and many times the amount of violent
crime than all illegal drug use combined.

It's quite amazing to observe the blatant contradictions between the
tolerance for tobacco and alcohol compared to the criminalization of other
drugs.  The NBA will run commercials claiming the "NBA Says No To Drugs,"
and the next ad is selling alcohol to a youth market, with NBA basketball
watched by a high percentage of underage minors.  What is the leading drug
related cause of death among minors?  Alcohol.  Why do we allow use of this
dangerous drug to be aggressively promoted among a youth market with
multi-million dollar advertising campaigns while our government ostensibly
is waging a so called "War On Drugs?"

http://www.maineparents.net/pdfs/medicalimpact.pdf.
--------

Milton Friedman quote below from web link directly under:

2. Filling the prisons. In 1970, 200,000 people were in prison. Today,
1.6million people are. Eight times as many in absolute number, six
times as
many relative to the increased population. In addition, 2.3 million are on
probation and parole. The attempt to prohibit drugs is by far the major
source of the horrendous growth in the prison population.

There is no light at the end of that tunnel. How many of our citizens do we
want to turn into criminals before we yell enough?

3. Disproportionate imprisonment of blacks. Sher Hosonko, at the time
Connecticut's director of addiction services, stressed this effect of drug
prohibition in a talk given in June 1995:

Today in this country, we incarcerate 3,109 black men for every 100,000 of
them in the population. Just to give you an idea of the drama in this
number, our closest competitor for incarcerating black men is South Africa.
South Africa—and this is pre-Nelson Mandela and under an overt public policy
of apartheid—incarcerated 729 black men for every 100,000. Figure this out:
In the land of the Bill of Rights, we jail over four times as many black men
as the only country in the world that advertised a political policy of
apartheid.
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45/337.html
------

>From the National Review on the War On Drugs:

http://www.nationalreview.com/12feb96/drug.html
-------

Ted Moffett

On 8/17/06, lfalen <lfalen at turbonet.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> Corected version
> > Ted
> > I agree that there are a way too many people in prision. There are ways
> to reduce this level. A stronger effort should be made in the aera's of drug
> education and rehabilitation, both in schools and in prision. Job training
> should  also be increased to get people out of prision and into productive
> jobs. There are other ways of dealing with people that are not a threat to
> society beside locking them up. Keeping someone in prision is extremely
> expensive. For those who have committed white collar crime, confiscating all
> their worldly possessions would be a better punishment. Sex offenders and
> others that pose a physical threat should never be released.I also abhor
> the aptitude  of guilty until proven innocent.
> >
> > Roger
> > -----Original message-----
> > From: "Ted Moffett" starbliss at gmail.com
> > Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2006 23:00:52 -0700
> > To: "Saundra Lund" sslund at adelphia.net
> > Subject: Re: [Vision2020] Suspect arrested in JonBenet Ramsey case
> >
> > > Hey Saundra-
> > >
> > > Warning.. angry rant to follow, with ruthless logic!
> > >
> > > I just read about this development.  It might be that again we have an
> > > example where the media heaped unjustified implications of guilt upon
> the
> > > innocent (Jon Benet's parents) to exploit a tragedy for the sake of
> the
> > > profiteering media ratings game.
> > >
> > > Oh, but I forget, in the new climate of civil rights in the USA, you
> are
> > > guilty until proven innocent, and anyone who says otherwise is a
> sympathizer
> > > with the pity party for the rights of criminals that is a liberal plot
> to
> > > undermine the righteous justice that must be carried out.
> > >
> > > And the fact the USA has the highest incarceration rate per capita of
> any
> > > democracy on Earth, just means that unlike those other more liberal
> and
> > > social democracies, we mean business when it comes to removing evil
> from our
> > > streets, while the USA continues to have high rates of domestic
> violence,
> > > gun violence, and murder, higher than most other democracies.
> > >
> > > These facts have nothing to do with any failures of our culture to
> address
> > > the glaring inequalities between the rich and poor... To claim this is
> to be
> > > marginalized as a left wing extremist.  As if a system that demands
> the need
> > > to incarcerate such a high percentage of its own people does not have
> some
> > > sort of fundamental flaw in how it is structured?  Some lack of
> humanity and
> > > compassion, a lack of willingness to address the despair of the
> desperate?
> > >
> > > No, the blame clearly falls upon those poor marginalized people who
> embody
> > > evil, due to their imperfect moral character... Let them rot in jail!
> > >
> > > I got my happy fat life, and to hell with them!
> > >
> > > Ted Moffett
> > >
> > >
> > > On 8/16/06, Saundra Lund <sslund at adelphia.net> wrote:
> > > >
> > > > http://www.cnn.com/2006/LAW/08/16/ramsey.arrest/index.html
> > > >
> > > > Saundra Lund
> > > > Moscow, ID
> > > >
> > > > The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people
> to do
> > > > nothing.
> > > > - Edmund Burke
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > =======================================================
> > > > List services made available by First Step Internet,
> > > > serving the communities of the Palouse since 1994.
> > > >               http://www.fsr.net
> > > >          mailto:Vision2020 at moscow.com
> > > > =======================================================
> > > >
> > >
> > >
>
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