Mike Riggs: Will Drug Courts Undermine Marijuana Legalization?
Today, when drug legalization advocates argue that imprisoning nonviolent, low-level drug offenders destroys families and destabilizes communities, no one disagrees. Republicans, conservative Democrats, and leaders in the criminal justice industry have all come around to the idea that locking up people who are not dangerous creates more problems than it solves, and now largely favor alternative-to-incarceration programs for nonviolent drug offenders.
But as Mike Riggs reports, while it is tempting for civil libertarians to see drug courts and the drug-treatment option as a useful weapon in the fight against the prison industrial complex, there's an important catch: The people fighting for prison reform are not fighting for drug legalization. In fact, many of them are fighting against it.