The drug war is WRONG, WRONG, WRONG.

http://ap.google.com/media/ALeqM5itJNTIxm5C4IzpnZxP7ejMWxTl0Q?size=m

Marie Walsh, née Susan Lefevre, got into drugs after her sweetheart was killed in Vietnam in the 70s; she was sent to jail for 10-20 years, and managed to escape, moving to California and beginning a new life, with a new family, that would last 34 years, until an anonymous tip-off brought police attention to her.  Now she and her family are basically screwed, because of a "mistake" she made decades ago, and despite the fact that she is the farthest thing from a menace to society.

UNCC history professor Heather Thompson recently gave a hell-raising talk at the Organization of American Historians conference in New York, during a panel about the legacy of 1968 radicalism.  While some of the other older panelists had a rosy view of what the boomer lefties had accomplished, Thompson talked about some of the really bad shit that has happened in the last 40 years, especially with regard to the prison-industrial complex:

1. More and more people have been locked for nonviolent offenses, thanks to the hopeless war on drugs and "tough" mandatory minimum laws, which force judges to issue sentences for a defined period of time regardless of the circumstances of the case. 

2. Felons have been stripped of their right to vote, which has disproportionately disenfranchised black men to a massive degree.

3. Corporations get to take advantage of cheap slave labor by contracting with prisons to manufacture goods, while prisoners get paid a measly amount of money for each day's work to buy candybars in the commisary; meanwhile, the labor movement is hamstrung by the use of this forced labor, which cannot organize to represent itself.

4. Private prison corporations get to cash in.

5. Voting districts with prisons get to count disenfranchised inmates as citizens for the sake of calculating their population and, thus, electoral influence.

And all of this is basically invisible to the average law-abiding, or even law-breaking, American citizens, except for the occasional episode of Oz or the prisonsploitation programming on MSNBC.

I sincerely believe that the drug war and the prison industrial complex are two of the most important issues that never, ever get discussed in political discourse.  Candidates can't touch this stuff with a ten foot pole.  I literally dragged a young black man to the polls in Philadelphia, after his mom and I both harangued him about the importance of voting.  He just didn't believe that voting changed anything, and he didn't want to participate in the system.  I wish I could have told him that Barack Obama would do something about police brutality or the drug war or the massive incarceration rates, but I couldn't.  All I could say is that I thought he would put us on the right track toward solving those problems, if not taking them head-on.

We are all paying into a system that breeds violence and brutality for those poor souls who are trapped inside it, profits for unscrupulous corporations, and mushrooming expenses for the detainment of a massive number of American citizens.  All for the sake of stopping someone from smoking a joint?  Do we really want to throw a peddler of magic mushrooms in with rapists and murderers -- the sort of people society should be using its resources to separate from the rest of us?

What could we do with all the money that's poured into prisons?  What would happen if all the incarcerated nonviolent drug offenders were out on the streets?  I bet the unemployment figures would not be so artificially depressed as they always are.