Most friends of mine regularly do drugs. Even the self made multi millionaires. None of them have been to jail. They aren't subject to the random ass searches like the poor are.
If things were different - if the millionaires were treated with the same suspect, you bet your ass these laws would change.
But they aren't. So the laws stay the same. And that's a problem.
For instance, up until 2010, there was a 100:1 (one hundred to one) disparity between federal criminal penalties for crack cocaine possession vs. powder cocaine possession. Crack possession also carried a mandatory minimum five-year sentence. Obama signed the Fair Sentencing Act in 2010, reducing the disparity to 18:1 and removing the mandatory minimum. The law is still influenced by the incorrect belief that crack is more dangerous than powder, but the legal system is capable of recognizing and fixing its flaws (even if the fix is partial).
So if the police get complaints from neighbors they respond to that. If your rich neighbors tolerate your coke addiction, they don't come knocking. If you have a noisy neighbor who complains they do come knocking. Police respond very much to community complaints, from my experience with them growing up.
Whenever the police came to "bust" activities, it was mostly due to neighbors calling in "suspicious activity" I.e. Underage drinking and weed.
E.g. see http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/january_february_2...
"in investigatory stops, a black man age twenty-five or younger has a 28 percent chance of being stopped for an investigatory reason over the course of a year; a similar young white man has a 12.5 percent chance, and a similar young white woman has only a 7 percent chance. And this is after taking into account other possible influences on being stopped, like how you drive. " [in other words, this sample has been corrected for any difference in base-rate of justification for being stopped].
The interesting thing is, profiling like this can be a self-fulfilling prophecy; if the base-rate of drug possession is equal between blacks and whites, but blacks are stopped more often, then there will be a higher number of arrests of blacks per-capita, and it will look like blacks are more likely of committing a crime. This higher crime rate looks like a justification for profiling, when in fact it's just an artifact of the profiling that was done.
[Note I'm not making any claims about the actual base rate of drug possession, just illustrating an effect with an example]
FTFY
The fact that I cannot determine this from context may be a problem all by itself.
And while it's true that there is usually a reason for throwing people in jail, that reason is often an arbitrary, capricious, or morally dubious reason. I prefer that people go to jail for doing a specific, non-accidental harm to someone else, rather than doing something that merely offends a moral principle held by someone else.
Get high on a PCP dipper, and you are only hurting yourself. Get high, strip naked, and go out to jump on top of cars, and you might do time for all the auto-body damage, proportional to the cost of repairs. Get high on heroin, and you are only hurting yourself. Share some of your heroin with someone who doesn't know how dangerous it is, who then dies from asphyxiation, and you might go down for negligent manslaughter. Get drunk on alcohol, and you are only hurting yourself. Get drunk, and then try to drive home, taking out 14 mailboxes and one step-down transformer, and you might be doing some time.
...unless you have money, or know the right people. One of my former bosses occasionally mentioned at work that he grew weed inside his house. He probably went months without ever even seeing a cop. No suspicion means no searches, means no evidence, means no prosecution, means no jail. I have known people who drove drunk on at least a weekly basis, and never got cited for it even once. They all either had money or a few cop friends.
It isn't just that the justice system is not enforcing malum prohibitum offenses among that class, but they also look the other way for more serious malum in se crimes. The rich can afford more skillful lawyers. The connected can get the police and prosecutors to back off a bit.
I know someone who quit a prosecutor job because she got tired of putting people in jail for being poor. That's what modern policing is doing. It's packing the prisons with poor people and the jails with the untreated mentally ill. I didn't vote for this. I don't know anybody that would. Yet the people around me keep electing representatives who promise to be "tough on crime" and the "law and order" candidates, without stopping to consider that those people may be inventing new crimes just so they can get tough on them, or that their new laws may encourage more civil disorder.
