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I know it's ever-so-slightly off topic, but...I'm just going to go out on a limb and say that if we're going to play the post-9/11 game, then perhaps instead of evaluating our draconian penal laws in light of how safe the streets aren't because we're busting potheads, or how secure the country isn't because we're putting away teenagers making fake IDs, perhaps we might think about how the tens of billions of dollars we piss away every year pointlessly trying to keep people from smoking weed, or high school kids from drinking beer and going to strip clubs, might better be spent upping the ratio of shipping cargo screened in our ports from 1% to something less chillingly laughable; or perhaps coming up with a way not to have trains carrying toxic chemicals, flammable materials, or poisonous gases routed through our major cities each and every day; or providing actual training of TSA agents so that our airport security isn't an international joke, or enough air marshals so that each and every flight actually has guards on board.
Let's face it: who we send to jail, the way we enforce our criminal laws, and the way we treat our criminals, has absolutely jack squat to do with national security. It has everything to do with what color the criminals are, and who stands to profit from disenfranchising them, and who makes money off the vices that are legal, and has interests in keeping the illegal vices illegal.
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Dull sublunary lovers love,
Whose soul is sense, cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
That thing which elemented it.
(From "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" by John Donne)
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