Observation: I watched a documentary called the House I Live In in my social inequalities class which is about the war on drugs in America and what has been happening on it.
I don't know a lot about prison and drugs, but from what I've been learning I think I can say something is screwed up.
We can agree that drugs are "bad," but what is evil is how we have responded to drugs in America. Prisons have been privatized and this has led to the changes in policies that push for more active police work to "stop criminals." We see how politicians are influenced to conform to stupid ideas that lead to high consequences and penalties for crimes that involve drugs. Even if its understood that these are not always the most effective ways to stop drug flow and usage from happening, they do it in order to get re-elected. Prisons are getting filled up with people who have done minimal crimes and we already learned about this punishment system that is happening that is not helping compared to a preventative or treatment attitude towards people who are caught using.
Changes need to be focused on the bigger problems such as the suppliers of these drugs and how its traveling up from I-35 up past Austin, Dallas to Chicago and spreading across the nation. Its hard to understand how and why our current leaders are doing what they are doing in this war that Nixon began. I really reccomend that you guys watch this documentary. It brings up great questions and provides supplemental info that we heard about the prison system and what its doing when we had our guest speaker (sorry, I forgot her name =[ ) talk about when she told us about her experiences and her son.
It is definitely interesting to see how all of these things are interdependent on one another. Foreign policy, narcotic and drug laws, prison sentences, treatment of addiction, and stigmas on addicts etc are all inter-related and influence one another. <-- Many more problems for us to solve in the future!
I don't know a lot about prison and drugs, but from what I've been learning I think I can say something is screwed up.
We can agree that drugs are "bad," but what is evil is how we have responded to drugs in America. Prisons have been privatized and this has led to the changes in policies that push for more active police work to "stop criminals." We see how politicians are influenced to conform to stupid ideas that lead to high consequences and penalties for crimes that involve drugs. Even if its understood that these are not always the most effective ways to stop drug flow and usage from happening, they do it in order to get re-elected. Prisons are getting filled up with people who have done minimal crimes and we already learned about this punishment system that is happening that is not helping compared to a preventative or treatment attitude towards people who are caught using.
Changes need to be focused on the bigger problems such as the suppliers of these drugs and how its traveling up from I-35 up past Austin, Dallas to Chicago and spreading across the nation. Its hard to understand how and why our current leaders are doing what they are doing in this war that Nixon began. I really reccomend that you guys watch this documentary. It brings up great questions and provides supplemental info that we heard about the prison system and what its doing when we had our guest speaker (sorry, I forgot her name =[ ) talk about when she told us about her experiences and her son.
It is definitely interesting to see how all of these things are interdependent on one another. Foreign policy, narcotic and drug laws, prison sentences, treatment of addiction, and stigmas on addicts etc are all inter-related and influence one another. <-- Many more problems for us to solve in the future!
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