Drugs & Alcohol Filling Legal & Prison System

Drugs & Alcohol Filling Legal & Prison Syste>

What is wrong with the US legal system that we need to have the highest proportion of our citizens in jail or prison? The main problem is the war on drugs. The US State department is no longer calling our situation in the Middle East the war on terror, I say we need to end the war on drugs as well and get more of the people out of the prison system and into effective treatment system which is one way to reduce the budget cheap. Lawyers judges and police departments are locked into the idea that locking people up that they will lose their addictions to alcohol and drugs which just does not work and is insanely expensive..

We have an 80% recidivism rate and 80% of the people that are in jail or prison are drug or alcohol related, take away the alcohol and the drugs and the recidivism rate drops. If you can get 30% of the people that are in jail to not go back to jail that is years and years of untold crimes and hundreds of thousands of lives saved in their prime.

The biggest problem with treatment is that it is mostly carrot AND no stick, If you don’t pay, no problem, you skip meetings, no problem, Go and get drunk or high they kick you out no problem, there is no checking up to make sure that people are involved and working the program, sure they do drug and alcohol testing but no follow up on the sincere and active participation in the programs and the treatment center has no way to induce the clients to really work the program.

The deal is this if the client can get 18 months of clean time the probability that they will then be clean for a significant amount of time measured in years goes way up and if you can keep them away from the drugs and alcohol the probability that they will become tax paying citizens goes way up as well, so you enlarge the tax pool and at the same time reduce the prison population and you lower the crime rate.

Treatment center today are sophisticated in their recognition of some of the telltale signals when the client is going to relapse and use drugs and alcohol again. Perhaps a solution would be a treatment centers that have probation - parole agents stationed there as their main office instead of the courthouses! This may seem a little far fetched but this is what some states do with their social workers is to base them at homeless shelters which makes sense. We also feel that this will cause a paradigm shift away from warehousing the core problem to getting into a real treatment solution.

There will always be the fringe that we need to protect ourselves from but many in the legal system today should be cycled out to reduce the economic burden on society and the cruel and inhumane treatment of sick people who have been criminalized for the sake of convenience.

Divorce & Bankruptcy

A well know fact is that divorce and bankruptcy rates go up when there is finical upheaval and the current problems are certainly going to put a asterisk on the numbers, as record numbers of people lose their homes in addition to their savings.

I was surprised to learn all thought I should not have been is that there are advantages to be in certain states that the rules make it more favorable generally in the south to get a divorce as you can protect more of your assets from creditors including your ex wife by filing bankruptcy. In theory you can be living in a million dollar house and have it protected. So you could have a judge award half to your ex wife and then file and basically put her at the end of the list and she could end up really getting screwed.

So I guess it would make sence to make sure that you find a lawyer that is going ot protect you and finding a good lawyer is extremely important considering what could be the possible outcomes