Quote:
Originally Posted by MrWookie
That data is meaningless in a vacuum. Because of plea bargaining you need to see what they were arrested for in addition to what they were ultimately convicted of (meaning what they pled guilty to as part of a plea bargain). There may be many states where people end up in jail as fist time small drug offenders, but New York generally isn’t one of them. Prison for a first time drug possession on a C, D, or E felony in New York would be an exceedingly rare occurrence.
Edit: Also missing from those statistics is how many of those in prison are there because they violated a probation sentence on a drug offense. Probation is pretty much the standard plea bargain for all first time drug offenders in NY up to and including B felony level, a judge can even override the DA on this and allow probation, so it’s pretty frequent. Also possible is Drug Court, a rehabilitative program which the defendant can get into without the permission of the DA, and which will end up with no jail time and likely dismissal/reduction of charges at the end. The hammer of failing drug court though is eventually ending up in prison (although usually it’s just local jail time) if you continuously fail out and disregard the court’s instructions. Defendants on these types of probation and drug court sentences in NY are almost always given a ton of chances and “relapse” violations before they are ultimately kicked off and sent to jail. Again there are many states that you can point to where this is a significant issue, but NY isn’t a good example.
Last edited by fxwacgesvrhdtf; 02-22-2019 at 07:42 PM.