Summary
"Most of what [Obama] has said previously on criminal justice issues has been good," says David Borden, director of the Drug Reform Coordination Network in Washington, D.C. "If he carries some of that into office, we could see an enormous change in the direction of the drug war and sentencing policies. That said, criminal justice reform, especially when it comes to drugs, has always been the first issue the Democrats drop when it looks like they're being called 'soft on crime.'"
"We've seen this for over 30 years now, that Democrats have often been reluctant or even hostile to the idea of embracing criminal justice reform," [Marc Mauer] says. "Our strategy is to continue to reach out to Republicans and conservative constituencies to develop broad support for some of diese reforms. We need to give Democrats a comfort zone ... a sense that tiiey're not being 'too out there.'""Every two weeks, for the last 20 years, the U.S. has built the equivalent of 900 prison beds," he says. "Still, our prisons are bursting at the seams. Over the last 38 years, we've had a cumulative arrest record of 39 million arrests for nonviolent drug offenses. When are we going to say, 'Enough!'?"See the full content of this document
Extract
Ending the War On Drugs
PRESIDENT OBAMA FACES A heap of crises: a major economic recession, crumbling national infrastructure, and ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Buried in that heap is another war, one less present in public discourse but no less toxic: the drug war. The concentrated battleground of the drug war has been on domestic soil, with America's socalled interdiction efforts spreading the fight across the world, from poppy-rich Afghanistan to the coca-nurturing Andes to the most brutal battlefield of them all, Mexico, which saw more than 5,600 drug-related murders last year, including several that involved publicly displayed decapitationsWith the Obama administration, many see an unprecedented opportunity for meaningful crimin...See the full content of this document
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