40k+ people in jail for marijuana @ ~$20,000 / year

[vostro]

There are approximately 40,000 people in federal, state, and local cages (a.k.a. hell on Earth) for plain ol marijuana-related charges. People like you and me. Tax payers pay anywhere from $20,000 to $40,000 PER prisoner PER year to keep these guys locked up making the decision as an adult that they liked marijuana.

Isn't that a little disturbing? These are approximate figures from the Bureau of Justice Statistics Prison Statistics. People are doing HARD TIME for cultivating and smoking a plant that predates U.S. black-robed law gods by many thousands of years.

[BathingApes]

Ridiculous

[Mohksha]

Ridiculous

ditto

[slightlystoopid27]

that means the gov. waste about 1,200,000,000 dollars a year on putting cannabis users in jail. now thats alotta money that could help fix a shit load of other problems in the US

[oToSmokeWithDave...]

thats just the tip of the iceberg. think of all the money that went into prosecuting these people. or further back, how much went into barely legal investigations, tapping phones, pulling records,...

the amount of money spent on the war on drugs almost matches the amount that americans spend on drugs. Because it is illegal, all the money we spend on drugs goes to mexico or the middle east, increasing inflation rates. LEGALIZE IT!!

[Rapidfire187]

Guys, I agree that MJ needs to be legalized, and that it's bullshit to go to jail over it, but you have to consider that all those people that are locked up did more than possess pot. Possession of pot gets you a night in jail in most cases. Distribution gets you long sentences. I'd wager that the majority of these cases are distribution cases. Nobody would be going to jail for selling weed if it was legal, so it's still bullshit that we're wasting tax dollars on locking people like this up, when we could just legalize the plant and force them to clean up their act by making money in a safe and legal way (or selling harder drugs, which would just be counter productive).