> And what exactly do you mean to suggest by citing violent crime statistics
> here?
Let me reverse it and ask what exactly is your point? I fail to grasp it from your posting.
I simply replied to ravi's comment that most inmates are "non-violent drug offenders" which struck me as utter bullshit repeated ad nauseam by Santa Cruz potheads while I was living there. Since then I have been living in Baltimore which has the third highest homicide rate in the United States, virtually all of it is drug related. Every day 365 days a year at least one a person - or to be more specific - a black male is killed in a drug related case. This is "normal" body count, but occasionally we make the national news when drug dealers, say, set a blaze a home with a family inside in revenge for them interrupting their trade.
So what is it exactly that you are trying to tell me - that the drug dealers are "prisoners of war" which was my tongue-in-cheek statement with which ravi took issue? Or that the 'war on drugs" is one of the most stupid policies ever pursued in this country - which I already know? Or what?
For the record, I regularly refuse to serve on juries in drug cases (for which I am called every year since I moved to Baltimore in 1992) citing "jury nullification" as the reason (i.e. my opposition to drug laws which would "prevent me from issuing a guilty verdict regardless of the facts of the case" - a formula that judges seem to like). So you are barking at a wrong tree if you are trying to convince be about the stupidity of the "war on drugs" and drug laws. But if you are trying to sell me that old "prisoners of war" canard, you may also save your breath, I am too old for such bullshit.
Wojtek