The war on drugs has corrupted even Joe Arpaio’s cops.
Building more private prisons won’t help this.
Ending the war on drugs will.
Philip Caulfield
wrote 25 May 2011 for the Daily News:
Three Arizona cops smuggled drugs and humans and laundered money for a
vast narco-trafficking ring, all under the nose of the self-proclaimed
“America’s toughest sheriff,” authorities said.
One of the moles, a female corrections officer, was carrying the love
child of a cartel capitán, and all three were accused of leaking
sheriff’s office tips to help the ring guide smugglers, drugs and cash
through the area from Mexico, authorities said.
Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio said Deputy Alfredo Navarette, 37,
and two corrections officers, Sylvia Najera, 25, and Marcella Hernandez,
28, were among 12 people rounded up in Tuesday’s sting.
Getting tougher is a failed strategy.
Time to
stop the cycle of criminalization that has corrupted even the office of
“America’s toughest sheriff”.
Legalize, regulate, and tax to end the cycle of corruption.
And no, we don’t need a private prison in Lowndes County to assist
in the cycle of corruption.
Spend those tax dollars on education instead.
-jsq
My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years — especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask — and rightly so — what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.
