There's about 95,000 people in federal prison with a drug offense as their most serious charge. About 11,500 of those charges involved primarily marijuana. (The overwhelming majority of that is for trafficking, not possession.)
Rolling Stone estimated about 40,000 people in prison for convictions primarily involving marijuana, with about half of those involving marijuana alone: http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/lists/top-10-marijuana-m....
That is of course not to say that justice, for a few tens of thousands of people isn't an important thing! Though I hesitate a little bit to put trafficking in the same "justice" category as using. It's generally accepted that the government has much more leeway to control what is sold in the market than to control what people do with their bodies.
Edit: here's a handy infographic: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2016.html
Note that while only a small proportion of the overall prison population is in federal prison, a much larger proportion of drug convicts are in federal prison.
"There's about 95,000 people in federal prison with a drug offense as their most serious charge. About 11,500 of those charges involved primarily marijuana. (The overwhelming majority of that is for trafficking, not possession.)"
So no, your statement is not correct. If we take 'overwhelming majority' of 11,500 as 60%, that would leave ~5000 prisoners whose 'most serious charge' is possession of marijuana. Or about 2.5% of the federal inmate population (all this assuming that the figures quoted are correct, I didn't source them myself).
I wonder if jail time has the opposite effect of rehabilitation for many, especially considering how much harder life can be with jail time on your record, or even just the black hole in your resume that you have to explain.
Not to mention that you spent the last however many years being told and treated like criminal scum, I imagine that would have a fairly significant impact on your mental health and self image, as well as your relationships with friends and family.
Decriminalisation isn't necessarily retroactive, that it's now legal or less illegal doesn't mean it was at the time of conviction.
For instance despite the Labouchere Amendment ("gross indencency") having been mostly repealed in 1967, Turing legally remained a criminal until his pardon in 2013.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-37711518
> Gay and bisexual men convicted of now-abolished sexual offences in England and Wales are to receive posthumous pardons, the government has announced.
> Thousands of living men convicted over consensual same-sex relationships will also be eligible for the pardon.
Millions? Millions??
Where on Earth are you getting "millions" from? And why is this completely absurd and unsubstantiated claim the top voted comment?
The idea that millions, or even hundreds of thousands of people are in jail for simply smoking a joint is a myth:
"Less than 1 percent of sentenced drug offenders in federal court in 2014 were convicted for simple drug possession, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission, and most of those convictions were plea-bargained down from trafficking charges. Even on the state level, drug-possession convicts are relatively rare. In 2013, only 3.6 percent of state prisoners were serving time for drug possession, often the result of a plea bargain, compared with 12 percent of prisoners convicted for trafficking. Virtually all the possession offenders had long prior arrest and conviction records. The meth users that Tustin, California, police officer Mark Turner encountered in his undercover narcotics days were sentenced to drug classes. “Then they would skip out of the classes and always re-offend,” he says." (Source: http://www.city-journal.org/html/decriminalization-delusion-... )
Also read: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-03-10/the-smart...
What counts as trafficking in the US? In England merely handing your friend a joint can be seen as dealing.
The war on drugs is now about a century old, and going strong.
Hopefully, future people will look on both as some kind of collective self-delusion. But the comparison is otherwise unfair to Cotton Mather, Samuel Sewall, and the rest of those Puritan ghouls responsible for that episode. And I can't believe I'm defending them.
I would expand that and decriminalize almost all forms of drug use (not selling/distribution). The number of people incarcerated for drug use is much higher than just those there on drug charges. A fair amount of property and public order laws are broken by drug users as well.
Getting them into a real treatment plan, with real job placement, housing assistance, etc, would stem more of that crime than throwing them in jail/prison.
I think in 100 years, more evolved humans will look back on the THC incarcerations the same way we now look upon the Salem Witch trials, or prohibition, etc. You know, one of those times where mankind just massively screwed up 'en mass' on sort of a societal level, and was unable to correct itself because the majority of people are brainwashed into believing whatever their parents told them about things. Sort of as a feed-back loop also, parents were unwilling to teach their children things that conflicted with societal norms. So society as a whole can fall into this kind of a 'rut' where getting out of it takes a long process of evolution of thought.