> am I missing some sane way to do a cost-benefit-analysis for cannabis policy that winds up showing costs (or negative externalities) that are big enough to conclude that criminalization is the best answer?
Yes, you are missing one thing: you classify "locking up millions of people" as a cost. For those who created and are perpetuating this practice, it is considered to be a benefit, not a cost. Consider private prisons, for instance: they would go bankrupt without such policies. Consider also that it is overwhelmingly black people, or hispanics, who go to jail on minor pot-related charges. A fundamental purpose of these policies is to provide the ability to lock up millions of colored people. Without this policy, the legal persecution of minorities would become more difficult.
The criminalization of pot is fundamentally about institutional racism. Yes it's expensive for the taxpayers, but the racists in power consider the price tag to be worth it.
The criminalization of pot is fundamentally about institutional racism.
Women are consistently less supportive of legalization than men (e.g. http://dailycaller.com/2015/10/08/more-men-than-women-suppor...). I've never heard claims suggesting that women are more racist than men, but this is consistent with women being more receptive to "for the children" arguments.
> Are excessive traffic fines and debtors' jails fuelling community tensions in suburban Missouri? Claire Bolderson reports on a network of ninety separate cities in St Louis County, most of which have their own courts and police forces. Critics say that their size makes them financially unviable and allege that some of them boost their incomes by fining their own citizens and locking them up when they can't pay.
> This edition of Crossing Continents goes out and about in St Louis County to meet the people who say they are victims of a system which sees arrest warrants issued for relatively minor misdemeanours. Many of the victims are poor and black. The programme also takes us into the courts, and out onto the freeways with some of the County's police, who say they are upholding the law and promoting road safety.
> The US government is not so sure. One of the towns in question is Ferguson where riots erupted after a white police officer shot a young black man dead last summer. In a recent report on the riots, the Department of Justice concluded that the Ferguson police had been stopping people for no good reason. It said they were putting revenue before public safety.
> Claire Bolderson investigates how widespread the practice is and considers the impact on relations between citizens and the authorities that govern them.
well i can't help but upvote said arguments because there's a lot of truth to them tbh. even if racism isn't inherently part of the system, it's still widely present in those that enact the rules of it!
Yes, you are missing one thing: you classify "locking up millions of people" as a cost. For those who created and are perpetuating this practice, it is considered to be a benefit, not a cost. Consider private prisons, for instance: they would go bankrupt without such policies. Consider also that it is overwhelmingly black people, or hispanics, who go to jail on minor pot-related charges. A fundamental purpose of these policies is to provide the ability to lock up millions of colored people. Without this policy, the legal persecution of minorities would become more difficult.
The criminalization of pot is fundamentally about institutional racism. Yes it's expensive for the taxpayers, but the racists in power consider the price tag to be worth it.