Time Flies

If you are not in jail.  There will be few Americans who don't spend some time in jail. The ever increasing growth in the DUI  industry ensures this. Even when not driving under the influence.  There is a war on drugs and this is the easiest battle in which to win and lose depending on the side you are on.

And if curious about your community and the crime stats. Check out this site the disproportionate numbers are quite telling.

If you truly don't think DUI laws are  a major encroaching issue on your civil rights and mark on your name, think again.  Read Lawrence Taylor's blog to read how this has become one of the many arms on the supposed "war on drugs."  He is truly an advocate and believer that is not about safe roads but about civil rights.  

Even when innocent you are guilty even when the Police lie to ensure convictions and protect their own. This story from Mr. Taylor's blog speaks volumes about the amazing ability to turn anything into a DUI. Thankfully this was on film but her recovery is not. Who will pay for the endless hours of needed therapy, the time from work and the of course outrageous hospital costs? The City? Think again. That is a lawsuit years in the making and taking. And no this is not an isolated incident.

Sober Driver Arrested for OWI When Deputy Crashes Into Her Car

Milwaukee, WI. May 3 – A Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Deputy rolls through a stop sign and causes a violent crash. So why was the victim placed under arrest?

A FOX6 Investigation finds that a deputy’s changing story may have changed one woman’s life forever.

Tanya Weyker was hurt so badly, she couldn’t blow into a breath-testing device or perform field sobriety tests. But a Sheriff’s deputy arrested her for drunk driving anyway. And the County hung those charges over her head for nearly a year, even long after blood tests proved she was perfectly sober.

Tanya Weyker remembers it clearly. Not just the crash that broke her neck in four places, but the false accusations that followed.

“My reputation is everything to me,” she said.

At the age of 25, Weyker’s criminal history is as flawless as her posture. She was diagnosed with cancer at age three, and the prolonged radiation treatments literally curved her spine. So doctors inserted metal rods to keep her back straight. The lifelong medical complications have not stopped her from pursuing a college degree. Or from driving a car. In fact, Weyker had never gotten so much as a speeding ticket until the night she crossed paths with Milwaukee County Deputy Sheriff Joseph Quiles.

It was February 20th, 2013, and Deputy Quiles was working the night shift on patrol at General Mitchell International Airport.

As he pulled out onto Howell Avenue to make his rounds, he T-boned a passing car and sent it spinning into a tree.

“Very scary,” Weyker recalls.

Her spine was already fused with steel. Now, she had a fractured neck to go with it.

“It was a miracle I wasn’t paralyzed,” she said.

As rescue workers tended to Weyker, police and Sheriff’s deputies started asking questions.

“One asked if I had anything to drink that night,” she said. “And I told them a few sips from a friend’s drink.”

A deputy noted a light odor of alcohol on her breath. He said her speech was slurred. And her eyes looked red and glassy.

“I explained to him my eyes were red and glassy because I was crying,” she said….

In his official report, Deputy Quiles wrote that he stopped at the stop sign and looked both ways before pulling out. He told a Milwaukee police officer that he never saw any headlights, even though Weyker’s Camry had lights that come on automatically.

“I knew I was innocent this whole time,” Weyker declared.

The truth might never have surfaced were it not for video from a nearby airport surveillance camera. It shows what investigators say is Deputy Quiles’ squad car traveling west on Hutsteiner Avenue, then continuing onto Howell without making a complete stop, as Quiles claimed in his report. The Sheriff’s Office knew about the video just two days after the crash. But no one told Weyker.

Instead, the County sent letters blaming her for the crash and threatening legal action if she didn’t pay for the damage.

Of course, if Weyker was drunk, it would have been easy to pin the blame on her. But less than a month after the crash, test results showed she had no alcohol in her system. And by July, her drug test came back negative too. Five months after the crash, it was clear Weyker had been stone cold sober.

But still the case didn’t go away.

“I don’t think it is fair at all,” Weyker said.

Five more months passed before a prosecutor finally looked at the case and declined to file charges. But even then, Weyker says, she was left in the dark.

“No one called me.”…

Then below I found the blog entry from Talk Left and once again I noted that once Economists get into the picture and now hedge fund moguls are realizing that the money in prison is actually not a winning calculation we may finally get something done with regards to the criminalizing the nation. Maybe its the sudden interest in white collar criminals and the few but still significant convictions and pleas by those in White collars from the street of Wall versus the one on Main. 

 When our white educated elite have to throw down the orange jumpsuit and spend time with a nice man named Shadrac as a roommate maybe that might be the contributory factor. But hey prison makes strange bedfellows and whatever draws attention to this epidemic, I will take it.

Report on America as a Prison Nation, More Criticism of War on Drugs

By Jeralyn, Section Crime Policy
Posted on Wed May 07, 2014

Human Rights Watch has a new report, A Nation Behind Bars, with facts on the current state of our prison nation and recommendations to reduce our over-reliance on incarceration.

Some facts:[More...]

• In 2011, more than 95,000 youth under the age of 18 were held in adult prisons and jails across the United States;
• Over half (53.4 percent) of prisoners in state prisons with a sentence of a year or longer are serving time for a non-violent offense;
• For every 100,000 Americans in each race or gender group, there are 478 white males, 3,023 black males, 51 white females, and 129 black females incarcerated in state or federal prison;
• Almost one-third of those serving life sentences—49,081 as of 2012—have been sentenced to life without the possibility of parole (LWOP);
• In 2010, 26,200 state and federal prisoners were 65 or older, up 63 percent from 16,100 in 2007;
• Today, immigration offenses account for over 40 percent of all federal criminal prosecutions and almost 30 percent of new admissions to the federal prison system.

The recommendations:

• Ensure that the severity of the punishment does not exceed the gravity of the crime;
• Reform or eliminate mandatory minimum sentencing laws that prevent judges from being able to tailor sentences to the individual crime and the particular defendant;
• Ensure that adolescents and children are treated in a manner appropriate to their age and capacity for change, and that they are not subjected to all the same criminal procedures and sanctions as adults;
• Reduce or eliminate criminal sanctions for immigration offenders, especially those who have done nothing more than enter the country illegally;
• End criminal sanctions for possession of illegal drugs for personal use; and
• Ensure that criminal law is not by its terms or enforcement biased against any racial, ethnic, or religious group, as for example, in the disproportionate enforcement of drug laws against black people in the US.

I would add one more:

Stop the extradition of drug traffickers from Mexico, Colombia, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic and everywhere. Let their home countries jail them and spend their dollars, instead of ours. Curtail the DEA. We don't need a global police force. If the home countries won't act, then perhaps it's time for our government to finally admit that the War on Drugs is a failure. It breeds violence and doesn't put a dent in drug trafficking.

Colombia's police chief recently called on the U.S. to strengthen extraditions. The U.S. should just say no.

The London School of Economics today is releasing a report on the failed war on drugs. It concludes the war has done more harm than good.

George Soros has an op-ed in the Financial Times, "A Futile War on Drugs that Wastes Money and Wrecks Lives." He says it's a $1 trillion failure. Here's a snippet:

Drug prohibition has created an immense black market, valued by some at $300bn. It shifts the burden of “drug control” on to producer and transit countries such as Afghanistan and Mexico. This approach also fails to grapple with a basic truth: drug markets are highly adaptive. Repress the business in one country and it springs up elsewhere.

Consider Colombia. When its law enforcement agencies made progress cracking down on the country’s cocaine trade, much of the criminal business and the violence that goes with it moved to Mexico. The LSE report estimates that after 2007, Colombia’s interdiction policies accounted for more than 20 per cent of the rise in Mexico’s murder rate.

Bogotá had a lot of mayhem to export. The explosion of the illegal drug market between 1994 and 2008 “explains roughly 25 per cent of the current homicide rate in Colombia. That translate into about 3,800 more homicides per year on average that are associated with illegal drug markets and the war on drugs”, according to the report. This type of violence takes a massive economic toll; corporations relocate, foreign investment dries up, industries decline and citizens flee in search of a better life.

Aside from the cost of investigation and prosecution, we spend $25,000 or more per year to incarcerate each one in our federal prisons, and there are thousands of them, many of whom are serving double digit sentences or longer. The extraditions may also be fueling violence.

By the numbers: From the State Department's International Narcotics Control Strategy Report Volume I, Drug and Chemical Control, March 2104:

• Since 1997, Colombia has extradited over 1,600 individuals to the United States. In 2013, Colombia extradited 132 persons to theU.S., most of whom were drug traffickers.
• Mexico extradited 54 people to the United States in 2013 and 115 individuals in 2012.
• The Dominican Republic is the fourth most active extradition partner to the United States. It extradited 31 persons to the United States in 2012, and 29 through the first 10 months of 2013.
• Guatemala extradited 4 drug traffickers in the first 10 months of 2013.
• The Haitian Constitution prohibits extradition of Haitian nationals, but the Government of Haiti has willingly surrendered Haitians and other nationals under indictment in the United States to U.S. law enforcement agencies.
• The 1999 Venezuelan constitution bars the extradition of Venezuelan nationals. Venezuela periodically deports non-Venezuelan nationals to the United States to face drug-related charges.
• In Panama, the Constitution does not allow extradition of Panamanian nationals. Panama has agreed to prosecute wanted individuals in Panama in lieu of extradition. (Why don't we works towards having those agreements with all these countries?)

How's this for irony: The report says the U.S. is helping El Salvador develop a new classification system to reduce prison overcrowding. Yet it does nothing at home.

The report has a special section on the DEA. The DEA has 86 foreign offices in 67 countries. In 2013, DEA conducted bilateral training seminars for approximately 14,070 participants from 94 countries.

How about our border patrol? There's a special section on them in the 2014 report as well.

CBP deploys approximately 46,346 law enforcement officers daily in 26,000 tactical vehicles, 260 aircraft, 290 watercraft, 367 horse patrols and 1,580 canine teams to keep our border secure.... The Office of Field Operations (OFO) oversees nearly 28,000 employees with more than 21,775 dedicated officers and 2,414 Agriculture Specialists that protect U.S. borders from 20 Field Offices, 329 ports of entry, 15 preclearance stations in Canada, Ireland and the Caribbean and 58 Container Security Initiative Ports.

The Office of Border Patrol (OBP)... drug interdiction activity includes staffing 139 stations within 20 sectors, with 31 permanent checkpoints nationwide.

The Office of Air and Marine (OAM) engages in air and marine interdiction, law enforcement, and air domain security. It targets the conveyances that illegally transport narcotics, arms, and aliens across U.S. borders and in the Source, Transit and Arrival Zones.

....In FY 2012, the P-3 Air Wing accounted for 117, 103 pounds of cocaine either seized or disrupted with a value of $8.76 billion. The Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) flew a record 5,737 hours in FY2012, the most in the program’s history. UAS missions contributed to the seizure of more than 66,500 pounds of narcotics.

Let's not leave out the Coast Guard:

In 2013, the USCG expended over 2,900 cutter days, 900 Airborne Use of Force capable helicopters days, and 8,000 surveillance aircraft hours on counterdrug patrols. USCG also deployed 17 LEDETs aboard U.S. Navy, British, Dutch and Canadian warships. As a result, the USCG disrupted 144 drug smuggling attempts, which included the seizure of 64 vessels, detention of 230 suspected smugglers, and removal of 88 metric tons (MT) of cocaine and 37 MT of marijuana.

We're spending money like drunken sailors on the war on drugs abroad and seizing massive quantities of drugs and dollars, yet drugs are as readily available as ever. We stop the labs in Colombia and they just move to Peru. We deal a crushing blow to one drug organization and another steps up to take its place, leaving scores of persons dead in the fight for dominance.

The U.S-driven global war on drugs is nothing but a losing proposition, feeding our prison over-population problems and bleeding us dry.