Should Nonviolent Drug Offenders Be Punished Differently
... Nearly 70% of all these prisoners are serving time for nonviolent offenses, which are nearly two million people across the country. ... Therefore, Nonviolent drug offenders should be punished differently. This is because nonviolent crime victims do no benefit from the misery of being in cells with violent inmates, because drugs are a public health problem, not public safety problem, and because nonviolent drug offenders can be educated. ... Punishing nonviolent drug offenders would help to accomplish this goal. Nonviolent drug offenders should not be placed in institutions, such as prisons, which are full of violent murderers and rapists (Lozoff). ... Most of the victims are young, nonviolent male inmates, many of them teenaged first offenders (Lozoff). ... Most of these inmates are nonviolent criminals who cannot or will not defend themselves. Unfortunately, this results in many of those nonviolent offenders no longer being nonviolent by the time they leave prison (Lozoff). ... Prisons are not scaring offenders away from crime; they are incapacitating them so they are hardly fit for anything else (Lozoff). ... If nonviolent drug addicts are not being traumatized by the violence of prison, they are simply clogging our nation prisons. ... 91 percent of the federal drug convicts were sentenced to serve time, compared to 91 percent of violent felony convicts, and only 83 percent of “public order” offenders such as tax evaders, racketeers and weapons traffickers (Chen). 61 percent of federal prison inmates are doing time for drug offenses, up from 18% in 1980 (Lozoff).