le the number of people in prison or jail has risen by 50 percent. In the past 30 years, 10 million people have been arrested for marijuana offenses in the U.S., the vast majority of them for possession and use. Indeed, in 1996, the most recent year for which figures are available, there were 641,600 marijuana arrests in this country, 85% of them for possession; more than in any previous year!Ira Glasser Executive Director of the ACLU, ACLU Spring 1998 National ACLU Members' Bulletin Issue 3Prison construction has become a growth industry and some states presently contract out their penal systems to private contractors who provide the actual services (guards and administrators) in running the institutions. The prison boom has its own inexorable logic. Steven R. Donziger, a young attorney who headed the National Criminal Justice Commission in 1996, explains the paradoxical thinking thusly: "If crime is going up, then we need to build more prisons; and if crime is going down, it's because we built more prisons -- and building even more prisons will therefore drive crime down even lower." Our national character, as reflected in our folk heroes, our games and indeed in our Armed Forces’ military strategy is one more geared to action rather than to reaction, to offence rather than defense And so throughout the last half century, whenever we have a problem we perceive as a grave threat to the country, we declare a “war” on the said menace, e.g. President Johnson and his “War on Poverty”, President Nixon and his “War on Cancer”, and in keeping with this pattern, what more natural response to the increasing use of drugs starting in the “Flower Children” and “The Age of Aquarius” Sixties than :”A War on Drugs”?If war is what’s needed, then it follows that a strategy must be formulated. If war is what’s called for, than it is necessary that the enemy must ...
