So much that is wrong in this post. You need to spend time to correct it and get it right.

That’s why you suspend their license permanently. They will be given everything including a sheet in bold red lettering that says they are suspended from driving. Then on the 5th dui they would be charged with driving on a suspended license and a dui. I tend to think people make mistakes but once you have been convicted of 4 duis and those convictions held up… you are a real danger to the road or very very unfortunate. The 4th dui would be known as red letter dui in my version of the law setting up a very punitive 5th dui.

Edit: also in some sense every dui is a policy failure.

Clearly, since you cited the incarceration stat again like it means anything important with regard to those in US prisons. I chose France and Norway because the OP did.

American prisons are filled with people who deserve the be there. As much as anti-law enforcement types like to spout off about some poor soul caught with a joint doing time in the joint, those people don't actually exist in numbers that would be considered anything other than a rounding error.

Then you have the truly unfortunate souls who were at the end of some lazy or malicious policework, but again, that number is a rounding error.

I don't actually know what the rest of the world does. Again, is America just a land of criminality?

If you legalized all drugs, you'd make a dent in the prison population by getting all the traffickers out. I don't actually know what the consequences would be on violent crimes. Many of those are pled down to the associated drug charges. But do you have one without the other?

Maybe you guys are right and the answer to all of our problems is free and legal narcotics.

Norway is a model for how I think our criminal justice system should be. Note there are many people to the left of this on me. My idea for the cjs system is basically copy and pasting Norway’s system with slight adjustments. To do this in America would require many many changes.
The Wikipedia entry is surprisingly helpful if you don’t know anything about Norway’s model
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_Norway

I'm familiar with their system, and it's hilarious to think about it being implemented in the USA in our current state.

This isn't a movie where you just give the big bad criminals cake and ice cream and it turns out they were just big teddy bears all along and everyone breaks out in song while holding hands.

It also helps when you're a tiny homogenous country with a massive oil and gas industry to keep your aforementioned tiny population fat and happy.

No, it's definitely the condition of the prisons that keeps Norway's nose clean.

Is this because our criminals are lactose intolerant?

This is the part of your posts that puzzles me - like, how is that not extremely important?

It would seem that you think it is. I mean, if the US isn't imprisoning more people than it needs to, how else do you explain incarceration rates that are on the order of 5x higher than that of pretty much all of the western world? Only three possibilities come to mind:

1) US is imprisoning way too many people
2) The rest of the world isn't imprisoning nearly enough people
3) America is a land of criminality

Of course there can be a lot of other contributing factors, but we're not talking about a 10 or 20% difference here. I'm having a hard time seeing how it wouldn't be one of those three things, and the first one seems most logical to me.

But I'm certainly no expert on this stuff. What do you think is the reason for the massive difference?

Damn
What about the other 70%? Just shitty drivers?

What does a letter/temp/permanently make a difference? They aren’t supposed to DUI at all and they do that. They aren’t supposed to drive on a temporary suspended license but do that. Taking their license away permanently won’t stop an alcoholic from getting their alcohol/bar fix.

Driverless cars are the answer but for now people have jobs, schools, and places to go. Drunks cause 30% of fatalities but think of how small a percentage they are in the driving pool.

Regardless of prison populations, there are certainly criminals in the US who should be in prison/jail but are not.

”A convicted felon who was caught on security video trying to break into a Van Nuys home last week proceeded to trespass into another nearby home the same night.

Robert Hemingway, who was out of town, watched security cameras from his cellphone as a man tried to get into his house last Wednesday, while his wife was home alone.

“As soon as I saw him prying with the knife, I told her she needed to call 911,” Hemingway said to KTLA.

The Los Angeles Police Department responded, but Hemingway says officers told his wife that even with video evidence, they didn’t have enough to arrest the intruder.

The victims say police promised to take the man, later identified as 31-year-old Gage Roth, to the hospital for evaluation. But 15 minutes later, Hemingway’s wife said she saw him back on Vesper Street.

“The lead officer said, well, he didn’t break enough of the rules here, so we got to let him go. So off he went,” Hemingway said.

Hours later, less than a mile away, Roth allegedly broke into a Vose Street apartment. He then took off his clothes and entered a bedroom where twin 12-year-old girls were sleeping.

“Then he gets in a huge fight with the family,” Hemingway explained. “A son had to watch the father in a serious brawl, and they held him down until the cops showed up.”

Police then arrested Roth — who has 42 previous arrests in L.A. County — on suspicion of residential burglary.“

https://ktla.com/news/local-news/con...F9F8TZcXk_w&__

"What the hell is wrong with New Orleans? They keep spending a ton of time and resources building and maintaining a levee system. Have they considered just not being at constant risk of flooding?" - Snarky residents of Kansas, 2021

Humans are all basically the same on a biological level. Local cultures are not. You pointing out that the incarceration rate of the USA is the highest in the developed world doesn't mean jack **** beyond the fact that the USA has the highest incarceration rate in the world.

It's like when you tell your kid to go to bed at 9pm and his retort is, "But Billy's mom lets him stay up until midnight!"

Well good for Billy, but around here we have a 9pm bedtime and that rule is enforced. If you want to stay up later than that, go live with Billy in his madhouse.

Again, go do a deep dive of our prison population and make the case for why any of them shouldn't be in there. The most common answer to that is we should release all the criminals with strictly drug charges. That will make a tiny dent, but we'd still be way ahead of other countries. So, either Americans can't seem to behave themselves compared to everyone else, or America itself is just more likely to enforce the rules of polite society.

We went over the FBI stats in some other thread, but IIRC, the percentage of people in the prison system on simple drug possession was in the low single digits. It's hard to really draw conclusions from stats alone, because I'll concede that maybe a simple possession incident turned into running from/fighting with the cops or whatever more serious crime landed them in prison.

I've changed my tune on drug laws and am actually in the camp of legalizing it and saying let people kill themselves however they want, but I want anyone on drugs who causes harm or even mild inconvenience upon an innocent bystander to feel the full force of whatever charges we can throw at them afterward. If you want to make your own life awful, fine, but please go die in a corner and don't take anyone else down with you.

I have seen two veins to this argument and want to understand which you are on (or is it other).

1 - those who say 'the law is the law and if you break it you deserve the punishment', while also recognizing some injustice in the law

2 - those who actually think the system is fair and just and thus those in prison are rightly there.


To elaborate on Point 1 an example would be a very harsh legal punishment where marijuana offenses are treated much more harshly and with more jail time as opposed to Cocaine offenses.

So for sake of this example if you saw a jail disproportionately filled with marijuana offenders while a similar number of cocaine offenders walked free would you say the people in jail deserve to be there 'because the law is the law' and they broke it disregarding the other factors and refusing to opine on whether you thought the law was just or not?

You could apply that question more broadly to all 'non violent offenses' that result in mass amounts of incarceration in the US whereas in other countries do not?

Is your view 'the law in the US says jail time is appropriate so they deserve to be in jail' while ignoring whether or not that law is right or just?

#1, but you immediately fall into the trap of arguing that the real injustice is all of the poor people in jail for pot while all the rich cokeheads walk free.

There are hardly any people in prison for marijuana.

The point I will concede and maybe needs to be investigated further is not knowing how many secondary crimes stem from the drug industry. What will the gangs do in a world where drugs are legal, and would that have saved the the violent criminals crowding prisons because they did something horrible while high or in search of a fix?


I believe thieves and burglars belong in prison, for instance. This country is not so broken as requiring you to take things that don't belong to you in order to survive. I don't want to live in a world where I have to keep my car unlocked at night because some ******* with no regard for others will otherwise smash my window to grab $3 out of the ashtray. Get your **** together or go rot in a box.

Still, we keep going on and on about getting non-violent or drug offenders out of prison, but they are such a small part of the population and I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when I point that out over and over again and people retort with dumb hypotheticals about crack vs powdered cocaine or black vs white sentencing.

I checked the Wisconsin stats and a vast majority of our inmates are in for violent crimes. Drug offenses make up less than 5% of the overall total. I assume other states are similar. We already know that federal prisons have less than 1% of inmates in for minor drug crimes. The total federal "drug" category is much bigger because of the people in for large manufacturing and distribution schemes.

So, knowing that a vast majority of US prison inmates are there for violent crimes, who gives a **** if we have a higher incarceration rate than most of the rest of the world? Given the rampant violence in some parts of the country, and the fact that I can't leave a bike on my front lawn for more than 30 minutes unattended, clearly our number isn't high enough.

Well provide some data then if you think non violent crime and marijuana does not result in jail time and meaningful numbers of people in jail.

Four-in-ten U.S. drug arrests in 2018 were for marijuana offenses – mostly possession

With 40,000 Americans Incarcerated For Marijuana Offenses, The Cannabis Industry Needs To Step Up, Activists Said This Week

cite

BtW.

What do you think of the fact that the people who got arrested for selling even small amounts of marijuana in the past are prohibited from being in ventures now that sell it legally. And correspondingly we have politicians and others who called for the harshest sentencing and most extreme drug laws now getting rish by being part of companies selling marijuana legally?

Nation's failed weed war turned many into prisoners and others into moguls

Ferrell Scott is spending life in a federal prison for selling large amounts of marijuana. Entrepreneurs are making millions now doing the same thing.


-------------

Would you support the idea of pardons for all those with just weed sale convictions so they too can make a living selling it considering society in these areas where corporate sales are allowed has determined it is not wrong after all?

It’s a pretty steep punishment. Most people with 4 duis don’t have their license perms banned. When you drive on a suspended license that is a crime, one you will be charged with at any stop, the officer will know , even if the stop is because
Of a minor traffic violation where you would normally get a small ticket/ fine. You’re basically asking why punish people for duis anyway they’re just going to drive drunk again. That’s not true. Most people are discouraged from ever driving drunk again after getting a dui, the process is painful.

https://hereverycentcounts.com/2011/...n-my-life.html

Here’s a blog about a nice lady who got a dui, note she’s still writing about life after a dui ten years later with a lot of various blog posts about it because for her, this was a life defining experience , as it is for many people who get a dui.

One thing about super draconian punishments would be that there are over a million dui arrests per year, 95% are misdemeanors so you would be talking about ruining a million people’s lives per year which would ( assuming huge prison times or hypothetical even more draconian punishments ) be worse for society than the 10k driving deaths , not that those aren’t horrible .

Most people who had a permanently suspended license, even hard core alcoholics, DO stop driving.

Drugs is just one reason our incarceration rate is so high. A few other things on the same scale: people incarcerated pre trial and people currently in jail/ prison for probation/ parole violations.

So... about 1.5% of the people in American prisons. And while this article provides no sources on the figures, it does mention people who are in prison for selling drugs, so I'm going to assume they are including every type of offense and not just possession.

100% yes, so people can stop bringing this up as their only retort every time topics like this come up.

I have no problem with drug dealers sitting in prison because they're likely selling to kids as well, but it's such a miniscule number in the grand scheme of things that yes, fine, let them all out so you can stop bitching about it.

So, now that we've knocked less than 2% off the American incarceration rate, how do we match up?

The stats are skewed because who is in prison at any one given time is counted, basically as a snapshot. Far more people go in and out of jail than go to prison but at any one given time there are more people in prison because the semtences are longer and much harsher. A guy charged with tax evasion or a burglary or breaking and entering might go to prison for a few months, while a rapist or murderer might be in prison for 40 years. Those few months plus the criminal record is enough to ruin a mentally ill poor person for good so I’m many states and jurisdictions there’s a bunch of homeless people who were charged with low level or mid level crimes. How we treat criminals affects recidivism which affects the safety of society. When Doestoyevsky said you could judge a society by how it treats its prisoners he was right.

I don't know how they do things in Kansas, but this is now how things work in Milwaukee.

I wouldn't be surprised if 30% of the people on the road in Milwaukee don't have a drivers license. At least 10% of the cars are unregistered, many without plates altogether, and the criminals are smart enough to know that the only punishment you get for driving without a license is... having your non-existent license taken away. You'll get a ticket and fine, too, but you're under no actual obligation to pay those because they frankly won't do anything to you when you don't. Your auto insurance premiums can't go up if you don't have auto insurance.

I liked your linked blog and I hope that woman is getting whatever therapy she needs to function, but people like her are not the ones that fill our prisons.

You just come across as very naïve. My guess is that's because Kansas isn't exactly a crime hotspot. Maybe the law enforcement community of Kansas has a hard time justifying their existence so they're throwing the book at jaywalkers and people with small amounts of drugs on their person, but in the parts of the country where crime is an actual problem, no cop is going to waste the ink in their pen to write that up.

It's actually pretty difficult to be thrown in prison. Not jail... prison. I don't have a good answer for you regarding the people that might spend X months in county jail while they await trial and end up exonerated. That, too, is exceedingly rare so I'm fine with the way it is.

This can't be true....right? 30% of drivers don't have licenses (which I assume is needed to get insurance?). I don't know anything about Milwaukee, but it sounds more plausible that there is some racial stereotyping or something else going on to get to these kinds of numbers?

It's a little hyperbolic, but maybe not as much as I'd like it to be.

https://www.fox6now.com/news/car-lot...censed-drivers

I'm talking about the more crime-ridden parts of the city since that's the topic, but yes we have a ton of unlicensed/uninsured cars and drivers on the roads of the inner city. Most of the many car thefts in the city are kids without licenses to drive as well. Gonna take theirs away, too?

Edit: Plenty more where that came from: https://www.fox6now.com/news/i-dont-...-been-licensed

Edit2: I've been hit twice on my commute. One guy fled but a cop saw it happen and chased him down. No insurance. The second guy was extremely apologetic and admitted he had no license or insurance but it was low speed so I said just give me your number and if I have a problem with the tire, we can take care of it with cash. He's still in my phone as "Dave can't drive" like 4 years later. I never called but it was probably a fake number anyway.