So yes, while drugs should be deillegalized and those crimes expunged, this is only but a first step on a long road to repairing the severe damage that was done to law and order by the very people fallaciously rallying behind "law and order" in the 80's and 90's.
>a totalitarian state controlled by a political police force that secretly supervises the citizens' activities
Can you explain how the US is all of those things?
don't know about amd.... * slaps knee *
Basically every step of the way, whenever some sort of reform comes up they fight it tooth and nail while simultaneously grabbing every bit of extra power that they can.
These powers include things like surveillance and literal highway robbery in the form of civil forfeiture. In the way of surveillance, they can now purchase peoples data and there are companies selling services to police which analyze and track citizens movements without a warrant. Combine this with a story I saw on HN earlier today about a company purchasing live footage feeds from citizen surveillance cameras for cops to, again without a warrant, use at will.
But wait, there's more!
There are also electronic communications surveillance programs such as prism (NSA) and hemisphere (DEA) combined with the magic of parallel construction to obfuscate the fact that any surveillance was even used to spy on citizens illegally.
Cops basically get to do whatever they want without any sort of punishment when they do harm to citizens, which they do regularly including murdering innocent ones. Perhaps you've heard of the LASD gangs that terrorize the communities they're supposed to be protecting? It's well documented and has been going on for years, it still is.
Prosecutors and judges generally side with the cops because they need them to do their jobs, they have undue influence not only over prosecution but also legislation in the form of strikes and union lobbying.
Police unions are probably the only union I think should be dismantled, all other unions for workers are great but police unions are actively harmful to society.
There is a lot that can be done about the quality of policing in this country but we are really far off a police state. We are simply a state with an incompetent perpetually afraid power hungry police, likely due to the prevalence of guns. It's tragic as is.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
Maybe you aren't the target now but who's to say you won't be in the future? Consider your perspective versus those who live in predominantly Black communities
Of course there are different degrees, and throwing out these characterizations in a thread about even more totalitarian societies would be inappropriate whataboutism. But as domestic societal critique they do have some truth.
That being said consumption of alcohol and drugs are not victimless. The beated wife, the ignored children. Sons growing up with father figure with no drive to self improvement. Therefore, I wouldn't mind rolling back a lot of the alcohol liberalization of the past few decades.
Ultimately the reason we consider some things natural rights isn't to create some prescriptive model for the shape of an enlightened society. Rather it's due to the inevitable ugliness when the government attempts to legislate into individual autonomy, and people react en masse. And the results of the "drug war" have most certainly been quite ugly!
Drug Offenses are nearly half the prison population [1]. So the prison population can decrease by significant amounts without releasing any violent criminals.
[1]: https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen...
this is not true. your data is federal only. most prisoners are at state prisons. drug offense is about 1/5 of total.
And is imprisoning people who are smuggling/distributing hard and potentially very dangerous drugs really that controversial?
i was just stating the fact that the initial number posted was wrong/incomplete.
Worse still you call yourself a liberal when in Europe you'd probably be a centrist moderate.
You aren't liberal, America's just massively skewed facist right now so you think you are.
Don't get me wrong, nothing wrong with a moderate, but a liberal wouldn't be calling for more imprisonment, they'd be calling for better recidivism.
It can ruin the victims life just as much as non-lethal violence (taking away a person's source of income, or transport required to keep a job, or wrecking a business they've spent many years building), but many take the 'it's only property, it's probably insured!' attitude.
And many at least see stealing from 'big nasty corporations' as relatively OK. But if people keep stealing from businesses until they close down or relocate and there's no easy shoplifting targets, will the thieves stop, or will they move on to stealing from homes?
I wonder why insurance is so high...
The problem isn’t just insurance. It’s that prosecution is insanely slow and is far more harmful to society than the actual crime.
I doubt the victims see it that way. If we just let people steal, it can turn into a runaway chain reaction due to a lack of consequences.
If people work for my living and see someone just steal for theirs with absolutely no consequence, what they learn is that social dysfunction is optimal, and that doing otherwise is being a chump.
Now, I do agree in a parallel way, but with a different solution. If we fix structural problems preventing people from being, or having hope of being, productive members of society, than that can prevent some crime.
"mere hundreds of dollars"
This is incredibly insensitive. That's a lot of money to lose to many people.
Insurance increases the expected cost of loss! -- the insurer would go broke if they were charging less than that.
So yeah, sure, it can save you from the boundary effect of it instantly wreaking your life but only by putting you at a constant disadvantage to people who live in less crime prone areas or whom are wealthy enough to self insure against such loss.
People who say this don't have real jobs; not the type of jobs where they'll end up on pain killers when they retire. They have laptop jobs on the softer side of intellectual rigor.
Money is time traded from your life, health traded from your body to your employer. Stealing property is literally stealing the purpose of hours of grueling work.
The liberal position—don’t make relatively harmless stuff illegal—is one way to reduce the amount of crime.
Sure, lock up people who do violent crimes (I mean, get them out of society while we try to figure out if we can get them psychological help), but instead of doing something dystopian like tent prison cities, just let out the people who shouldn’t be there in the first place.
(All that is to say, I agree with you, just think we should focus on the part that will benefit society).
In the past year I've seen different people claim that hemp consumption, property crime, and even intimidation with a firearm were nonviolent and that their perpetrators were merely marginalized individuals who need social assistance rather than prosecution.
I think GP's point is that even property crime is not victimless: It hurts everyone, it makes society worse, and it likely hurts the people at the bottom of society disproportionately.
But I may add, then, that the reformers have the burden of showing evidence for their position: they need to demonstrate that it is possible to have a low-crime, low-prosecution, high social net city somewhere in the US. I'm beginning to suspect that they are missing some critical component which is required to make such a system work for everyone.
> ... property crime is not victimless: It hurts everyone ...
"victimless" and "hurts everyone" are both at the two extreme, opposite ends of a spectrum.
It's fairly likely some of the property crimes occurring could be somewhere in the middle.
Genuine question; is that only physically? If I like causing people pain and anguish and suffering, and my weapon of choice is words, should I also be incarcerated because I hurt people intentionally? I tend towards not giving people a free pass simply because their weapon of choice is words, but (amongst other things) the US has a reputation for being very permissive with the spoken word.
I think there is a massive difference between physical violence (and property crime) and words. What sort of words are you envisioning here?
No, you shouldn't be incarcerated for that. You would be an asshole if you intentionally caused people anguish with your words, but being an asshole is not a crime (and shouldn't be).