More news of the relative triumphs of the 111th Congress, in the words of Andrew Sullivan: gettin' shit done. The House passed a bill today- crafted by Bill Delahunt (D- MA) and Jim Webb (D-VA) and garnering bipartisan sponsorship- calling for the establishment of a National Criminal Justice Commission. If approved by the Senate, this commission would perform a complete review of our nation's prison and criminal justice system, reacting to concerns on many levels about the efficiency and morality of this system. Although violent crimes have been on a decline in recent decades, the U.S. prison population continues to balloon, largely due to non-violent drug crimes. Our incarceration rate is the highest in the entire world, costing taxpayers massive sums of money and creating an adversarial relationship between large portions of the population (40.1% of Americans over the age of 12 have smoked pot) and the police. Within this system, the existence of racial and economic discrimination is absolutely real: African-Americans and whites smoke marijuana at comparable rates, yet the arrest rate for black residents Los Angeles county is 4 times higher than it is for white residents. Although this bill will hopefully do something to ameliorate the condition of non-criminal marijuana users nationwide, it is also a bill that makes fiscal sense and is intellectually satisfying to me. Self-reviews can sometimes be utterly useless, but I think the current state of he economy means that this Commission has real incentives to fairly assess our nation's prison system and hopefully make recommendations that streamline and re-prioritize our definitions of criminal behavior and how to best deal with it.
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