And more heartache for families in crime ridden urban communities as these people pour back into the population. Mark my words: expect the Dems to now turn up their rhetoric that felons should retain their right to vote.
Vote may cut sentences for 19,500 crack inmates
Buoyed by a Supreme Court ruling, some 19,500 federal inmates and their families, most of them black, are hoping the U.S. Sentencing Commission is ready to make its recent easing of crack cocaine punishment guidelines retroactive…
Making the guidelines retroactive is opposed by the Bush administration. A senior Justice Department official warned Tuesday that retroactive guidelines could have a disastrous effect on crime-riddled communities that are not ready to receive crack offenders who could be released early from prison as a result.
The legitimate solution, of course, would be to increase sentences for powder cocaine convictions, not lessen sentences for crack dealers and users. But we certainly can’t start to expect the system to make any sense, especially as we become more and more sissified.
While they’re at it, the U.S. Sentencing Commission should just establish guidelines that would punish white, powder cocaine dealers/addicts for NOT using crack. That should help with the discrepency… .
This is one of those ugly rumblings we’ve been hearing for a while now. For example, in this New York Times article from 2005:
It’s despicable the way our leaders in Washington don’t hesitate to sell us out for personal gain. Then they turn on that smarmy holier-than-thou rhetoric, as if we’re the bastards for standing in the way of progress. My heart breaks for those rapists and murderers who society continues to look on with concern. Yeah, it’s all our fault, as usual.
One of my pet peeves is this bogus idea of paying your debt to society by doing prison time. There is no balancing the books for a crime. The victims, especially the dead ones, and the victims’ families will never get back to where they were before the crime. Many have permanent physical disabilities and all have some degree of psychological scarring. An enormous amount of society’s resources go into guarding against crime. Lifestyles are altered for fear of being a victim of crime. Every single criminal has contributed to this mindset. Prison is a punishment not a mortgage.
Surprise! It’s not just Democrats: our own first-term Republican Governor in Florida, Charlie Crist, who was elected partially because of his record of being “tough on crime” as the former Florida Attorney General, fought for and has achieved the automatic restoration of voting rights for felons.
I guess he thinks crack pushers, gang members, and rapists will consider voting for his re-election. I can’t wait to sit next to a member of this new constituency at the next Republican grassroots meeting.
I’m going to have to vote with the wrong side here…that is not the right.
Drugs are drugs and cocaine is cocaine. Crack is no more or less of a problem than powdered cocaine in terms of the human brain or the human body. The most addictive and dangerous way to ingest cocaine, intravenously, is not “more illegal” than just snorting it.
Crack is all about packaging. By taking a rather perishable powdered products and making it into an insoluable rock, it became easy to market to those without a home. Crack was all about taking a dangerous drug that you couldn’t get to the poor before, into the hands of those who already had little to loose.
Just wait until Meth hits the heart of urban America! Look at smaller midwestern cities like Des Moines, St. Louis, Terre Haute, etc. Imagine that in Detroit, Philadelphia, Miami, or Gary.
Cocaine is bad news but tougher sentences just don’t make sense relative to powdered cocaine. As it stands now, enough Crack to get a room full of knuckleheads wasted for an evening will get a person more time in prison that the an amount of heroin that could send a whole neighborhood into the gutter for a week.
This stuff has to be proportional to work. Same for white collar crime. Nobody gets hurt so what the heck, small sentence. Ask the people whe were ruined by Enron or the S&L scandal of times past. Somebody with a fistful of Crack can pretty much hurt only themselves and maybe a couple of others. Hundreds of thousands of people were ruined by these white collar crimes and sentences were light for just about everybody.