Tag Archives: guerra de las drogas

Prison gang violence

This is what eventually happens in

a country with 5% of the world’s population yet 25% of the world’s
prisoners,
in a state that has
1 in 13 adults in the prison system (jail, prison, probation, or parole): prison violence the prisons can’t deal with,
possibly including

the mysterious violence at Valdosta State Prison.
When we stop locking up so many people by ending the war on drugs,
we’ll have plenty of money to adequately secure the few remaining
real violent offenders.

Rhonda Cook wrote for the AJC Saturday,

Gang violence in prison is increasingly deadly,


In a little more than 10 months, 12 inmates and a guard have been
stabbed to death in Georgia prisons, a dramatic uptick in violence
that law enforcement officials and human rights advocates agree
points to increased gang activity.

“We cannot remember a time like this when we were getting this
volume and severity of violence,” said Sara Totonchi,
executive director of the Southern Center for Human Rights, which
monitors prison violence.

People who go into such prisons, if they aren’t already violent,
are likely to be taught to be violent, and some just don’t come back out.
Yet those that do get out can be bad for the rest of us:

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U.S. has “moral responsibility to reduce the flow of [drug] money towards Mexico” —Felipe Calderón, President of Mexico

The Mexican president who put the Mexican Army onto the streets
to stop the drug war, resulting in 40,000+ deaths, many
collateral damage like

the son of writer Carlos Fuentes,
the Mexican president who

a year ago started hinting that that didn’t work and something else should be done,
is already following the path of his predecessors
Ernesto Zedillo and

Vicente Fox, in calling for the U.S.
to end the war on drugs.
Georgia can’t afford to continue spending a billion dollars a year to lock people up, especially while cutting education.
If we listen to the Mexican presidents, we can save much of that billion and spend much of the savings on education.

T.W. wrote for the Economist 23 November 2012,

“Impossible” to end drug trade, says Calderón,

In an interview recorded last month for this week’s special report

Felipe Calderon, President of Mexico
on Mexico, Mr Calderón said: “Are there still drugs in Juárez [a
violent northern border city]? Well of course, but it has never been
the objective…of the public-security strategy to end something
that it is impossible to end, namely the consumption of drugs or
their trafficking…

“[E]ither the United States and its society, its government and its
congress decide to drastically reduce their consumption of drugs, or
if they are not going to reduce it they at least have the moral
responsibility to reduce the flow of money towards Mexico, which
goes into the hands of criminals. They have to explore even market
mechanisms to see if that can allow the flow of money to reduce.

“If they want to take all the drugs they want, as far as I’m
concerned let them take them. I don’t agree with it but it’s their
decision, as consumers and as a society. What I do not accept is
that they continue passing their money to the hands of killers.”

The Economist article spelled out what Calderón still doesn’t quite say:

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