After 25 years in jail, the Internet blew my mind

   "Staff members oversaw policies that placed enormous barriers between the 
    people inside boundaries and society. In the prisons where I served my 
    sentence, prisoners were even prohibited from accessing electronic 
    typewriters. They had their reasons, I suppose, but blocking people inside 
    from using technology did not go far in preparing them for success upon 
    release."

Most murders are not pre-meditated. It people were allowed to cool down for 12 hours somehow, right before they comitted a murder, the murder rate would drop by 80%. All drug dealing is pre-meditated. You are not comparing similar things.

>A problem mentality indeed. The claim that a drug dealer "causes" overdose is just as ridiculous as the claim that a car salesman "causes" car crashes.

Selling safety approved cars is not illegal. Cars (unlike street drugs) are actually meant to help society. Your logic is sadly misplaced. if I you build a car from scrap metal in your garage and sell it to someone that dies in it because the brakes fail though, you'd better believe you are going to prison (as you should). This is a better example of reality than your attempt at misdirection.

>Correlation does not imply causation.

Correlation? we are talking about 15 countries with billions of people here. Sorry, there is no bigger "study" that could ever be done. In Singapore or other Asian countries, this fellow would have been executed - no question about it.

>I cannot see where logic plays into any part of this argument. He knew he was dealing drugs and therefore should be punished exactly X amount? Being complicit in a crime is certainly more damning than being an unknowingly participant, but no part of your analysis uses "sound and proven logic" to derive a 25 year prison penalty.

It is every citizen's responsibility to know the law. Sentencing is publicly available information. He could have found out with a single phone call exactly what penalty he would be looking at. What I am saying is, he is no victim. He chose to convince himself that he would never be caught. The heavier the punishment, the harder it is to convince yourself that it is worth the risk. Asian countries have proven this quite sufficiently. The problem is that our wussified system deems harsh punishment to be "mean" and so enables far more people to suffer in the long run.

If anyone here is married and is raising children, they know exactly how this wussification has penetrated into the fiber of our society so deeply. It is from women gaining power and influence. Women will not punish kids appropriately, they are too emotional and not logical. They allow their emotion to prevent them from seeing the big picture. Punishing your child today is difficult. it requires a lot of effort and requires putting a lot of unhappiness on your kids and yourself, but if you let everything go or don't give a fitting punishment (severity and approach to be 'fitting' varies from child to child), you are enabling your kids to become worse and worse. Eventually they get so rotten than you may decide to put your foot down. It MAY not be too late at this juncture, but one thing is for sure, if you had only taken care of business at a much earlier stage, It would have required less effort and pain for everyone involved.

Furthermore, women are the reason for the crippling level of political correctness that exists today. Women have instilled so much of this that the media, politicians and any other person who is in a position of any influence is paralyzed. They cannot place blame for anything out any group without risking a huge backlash.

Women are the reason for such high unemployment. 50 years ago, people were told, you don't work - you don't eat. Now we give people unemployment then disability for the rest of their lives (Not to mention that there is less jobs to go around now because women don't stay home to raise their own children).

Same with illegal immigration blindness, Social programs spending and waste skyrocketing, over sized government, invading foreign lands to "help those poor citizens", Illegal drug tolerance, poor educational system, Day care raises our kids now for crying out loud. No wonder this country is going to hell in a hand basket. Most parents shouldn't even be allowed to have a cat let alone children. Most moms of young kids are at work for 10 hours during the day and watch 1.7 hours of TV at night. What the hell are the kids doing during this time? The worst part is that (western) men are just standing by and letting this thing go. They are being subjugated slowly. Wake up men and lead your family like your ancestors did. You yourself will not be an ancestor if you keep on this way.

I fear that the west will eventually will fall because of this. Left will be Asia and Africa.

I am not assuming anything. I am basing what I say on facts that are easily available.

>Crime rates have been on a gradual decline world-wide over the same period. Moreover, this is a good overview of the research into the cause of the decline: http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-li....

TL;DR: It wasn't "tough on crime," it was phasing out leaded gasoline which had been causing neurological damage to children on a mass scale that was causing them to be irrational and violent as young adults.

Cool story, but I am talking drug abuse violations. These have quadrupled in the US over the last 25 years. http://bjs.gov/content/dcf/enforce.cfm while steadily dropping in Singapore over the same time period. The deviation clearly began when they got really insanely tough on drug crime.

So what does this have to do with lead?

Even if prison was entirely intended for corrections, it is punishment (a denial of freedom). So there is a fairness argument that if two people do reasonably similar crimes that they should get comparable sentences. That is just one argument though, and fairness (as always) is weighed against other arguments.