Hey, thanks for your comment about LEAP. I had heard of them in the past, but didn't consider them. That may be where I make a donation, but the issue again is that the organization is about prohibition. In an ideal world, the organization would be fighting for human rights and addressing prohibition as the lowest hanging, and first fruit to take off the tree.

The Innocence Project is amazing, but does not address the widespread solution we need. A noble organization, ABSOLUTELY!

As for your first comment:

>1) Are privately run prisons better for the good of society than publicly run prisons? What does the research say? How biased is the research? etc. IMO, Absolutely not.

This is the general opinion of HN, but is it the truth? I'm sure someone has addressed this opinion with honest analysis, but I don't know where it exists. Stating that "they are making a profit" is not good enough because there is more to the question than that.

Thanks again for pointing to LEAP. That is definitely a better marketed organization than NORML.

I know you hate the "they are making a profit" argument, but please consider the economic forces at play. This is a cohort that has almost no voice with which to protest their treatment, so every effort is likely to be made to drive down costs. Private prison oversight is fraught with problems. It's also not great for staff. It's a bad place to have "market forces" Take some prison manager who needs to fill beds to get his income up, what can he do? Increase reporting of crime inside the prison (assaults, contraband, etc) or find some county/state with extra inmates. What if they don't have any? Get them to "find some" It happens. These folks cover some of it at least for Texas. http://www.texasprisonbidness.org/

Jury Nullification seems to get bandied about a lot on tech sites. Yet in practice it is not as easy as one suspects, nor does it happen with any real frequency. It is common that defense attorneys are not allowed to instruct a jury to seek nullification, juries are regularly advised to apply the law in a case, and then there are courts which will screen out prospective jurors if they voice the opinion they don't agree with the law.

Then to top it off, you have to get all members of the jury to agree to it. With that you run up against morals and predispositions of the various jurors. It would have to be a pretty damn extreme law, one unfavorable with the public as a whole, to get caught up by a nullification and you can be the authorities would do their best to stack the deck

Why do you have to get the rest of the jury to agree with it? Isn't it sufficient to have eleven people wanting to convict based off of law, and one person voting no (and sticking to it) because of disagreeing with the law?