The latest of these has caused extra heartburn for county sheriffs — a sharp uptick in illegal drug use and trafficking. While the state of California struggles to pass judicial scrutiny, the big decreases in sentencing and prison time authorized by Proposition 47 have gone into effect.

“Judges expect that tens of thousands of Californians may seek to have their felony convictions reduced,” reported the Los Angeles Times. “Courts have had to scramble to handle the surge in workload, and some agencies are planning to ask for more public funding to cover the added duties.” In Long Beach, said City Prosecutor Doug Haubert, the changes have approached “the point of absurdity.” In Humboldt County, claimed ABC Channel 23, Prop. 47 created “havoc on the streets.”

Against that uneasy backdrop, criminals and wrongdoers involved in the illicit drug trade have begun gaming the system to appease judges, using technicalities and loopholes to supply the growing inmate and gang demand for hard drugs.

Unintended consequences

Earlier in the year it had become clear that many local jails were unprepared to handle the volume of incarcerated felons directed their way from state prisons by Brown’s “realignment” program. The Legislature passed some prison reforms, but these sometimes addressed challenges at the relative margins of the realignment problem.

In one instance, legislators sent to Brown a bill, AB966, that would eventually give free condoms to state prison inmates. Sexual activity in prison is not permitted by law, but HIV and AIDS have spread anyway. AB966, known as the Prisoner Protections for Family and Community Health Act, tasked the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation “to develop and institute a five-year plan to make the prophylactics available in all 34 麻将牌 of its adult prison facilities,” as UPI reported.

Now, county sheriffs have raised the alarm over the way drugs have widened the scope of realignment’s unintended consequences. In an Associated Press report, officials went on record that, in addition to bringing “tougher inmates to jails,” realignment has created an opportunity for offenders to use jails as a revolving door for the drug trade.

The culprit is “a provision allowing parole violators to serve 10 days in the local jail instead of months in prison.” This rule, dubbed “flash incarceration,” was “intended to give authorities a way to avoid sending parolees back to state prisons.” But, as AP reported, it has been “used by some offenders to bring drugs, hidden inside their bodies, into county jails,” according to state sheriffs’ offices.

A shifting target

Some uncertainty has arisen as to how the abuse is to be properly measured. While Adam Christianson, president of the California State Sheriff’s Association, called the drug spike a veritable “freight train,” AP noted counties could have an interest in playing up realignment’s adverse and unintended consequences, whether out of a desire for increased funding or decreased responsibility for adapting poorly to the state’s halting reforms.

Nevertheless, California officials cannot get around the fact that realignment has caused more unlawful activity, on pace to grow unless regulations change. Reform advocates had expressed enthusiasm last month that the Golden State had begun to turn the tide on incarceration, with voters approving Prop. 47’s downgrade of nonviolent felonies, including drug possession, to misdemeanors.

“As many as 10,000 people could be eligible for early release from state prisons, and it’s expected that courts will annually dispense around 40,000 fewer felony convictions,” observed Matt Sledge at the Huffington Post, in a report characterizing Prop. 47 as a blow to prisons and the drug war.

Rather than a clear-cut victory against an out-of-control incarceration regime, however, California’s conflicting and competing criminal justice reforms could better be described as a policy target that keeps shifting in uncomfortable ways.

As the Los Angeles Times reported, the judiciary has kept the pressure on state officials to push even more felons out from behind bars. Federal judges gave the state until the new year to roll out parole hearings for second-time felons who have served half their prison time.

Policies set in motion by Brown designed to satisfy the courts “cut California’s prison population by 1,000 inmates,” the Times cautioned, “meeting short-term goals even though state projections show inmate numbers will continue to rise.”

Happy New Year!

Are you familiar with the state that has such an innovative and advanced marijuana industry that quality control extends to making sure pot brands consistently produce the same sensations? Where entrepreneurs are turning to increasingly sophisticated tools to improve their product and reach out to customers?

No, I’m not talking about Colorado or Washington state. I’m talking about California. Reason magazine’s Greg Beato has a fascinating look at the Golden State’s national leadership in a field, so to speak, that few know of. Beato considers this development an inspiring model of unrestrained, risk-taking, innovative capitalism:

“A previously forbidden sector of commerce has evolved into an increasingly professionalized multibillion-dollar industry, complete with a robust retail infrastructure, a lucrative trade in equipment and supplies, trade shows, media outlets, educational institutions, and a surprisingly vast supply of entrepreneurial stoners who seem to get at least as buzzed by marketing, product innovation, and event management as they do by a few puffs of Platinum Skywalker. All without any regulatory hand holding from Sacramento. …

“We live in an age of pervasive government intervention. The Code of Federal Regulations has added 43,504 pages since California first passed Proposition 215 in 1996. Yet while this bureaucratic bulwark was growing as thick as the Great Wall of China, our nation’s largest state, which doubles as the world’s eighth-largest economy, was permitting the sale of a substance that had been illegal for 60-plus years. In theory, this wild, wild west should have exploded into chaos, or at least something a little more raucous than a bunch of entrepreneurial Ph.D.s monitoring the fungus levels of freshly cultivated Lemon Kush.

“Yes, there has been drama over the years: NIMBY complaints, dispensary bans, and, of course, federal raids. But the most visible manifestations of California’s medical marijuana industry have been hydro stores in strip malls, advertisements in alternative weeklies, and $12,000 trim machines. While the threat of federal intervention and city-wide regulations have played significant roles in the industry’s evolution, capitalism arguably has been its most functional regulator.”

There is a downside to this tale

There is a downside to this tale that Reason’s article doesn’t address. CalWatchdog’s Katy Grimes had a grim piece over the summer about the toll some pot growers are taking on wilderness areas.

But as a libertarian who thinks the drug war is crazy and that excessive government regulation is destructive, I found Beato’s story deeply enjoyable.

Read it here.

By Steven Greenhut

SACRAMENTO — “As many as 100,000 crack babies are born every year,” reported the Los Angeles Times in an overheated 1990 article echoing the results of a Department of Health and Human Services study. The feds were calling for a massive influx of tax dollars to fund social programs for a new generation of Americans born to mothers who used so-called crack cocaine.

The article included a “must have” list for government agencies: more postnatal care and foster care, extra dollars for schools to deal with the disabilities these children reportedly would have, government-provided residential care, drug programs and more.

“But absent those billions of additional dollars, what can state and local government do now to help those innocents?” the article asked, almost hopelessly. This was typical of news coverage of what was called the crack epidemic.

More than two decades later, we learn the truth. The hysteria — which led to new drug laws that imposed unreasonably harsh sentences on the largely African-American users of that particular form of cocaine — was unwarranted. The numbers of crack babies were wildly exaggerated. As the New York Times now reports, “This supposed epidemic … was kicked off by a study of just 23 infants that the lead researcher now says was blown out of proportion.”

No one suggests that it’s healthy to use cocaine while pregnant, but years of study show that the “shocking symptoms” that crack babies displayed were actually symptoms found in many newborns. “A much more serious problem, it turns out, is infants who are born with fetal alcohol syndrome,” according to the Times.

‘Do something!’

I recall the “we must do something” attitude of the time, which clearly played on the public’s fear of inner-city crime. Never mind now. But it’s not as if the people who have spent years in jail for possessing crack cocaine can get their lives back. Don’t expect Congress or state legislatures to rethink any of the laws they hastily passed. And don’t expect anyone in authority to have learned anything from the new reports revising the crack-baby scare.

Then, the same week, comes word of a new study designed to scare us about marijuana legalization. It sounds even less believable than the discredited crack research.

“Children poisoned after eating brownies, other foods laced with medical marijuana, study finds,” blared the headline in the Syracuse Post-Standard. Basically, the feds contend Colorado’s new law legalizing marijuana is leading to kids inadvertently eating Mom’s pot-laced brownies, which isn’t good but hardly amounts to a poisoning epidemic.

There’s no evidence that pot legalization caused such mishaps. People have been eating pot brownies for as long as I can recall, even though it generally was illegal. But the goal of such studies isn’t a reasoned debate. The goal is to prompt upset legislators to pass laws designed to slow down the burgeoning legalization movement.

And as Reason magazine’s Mike Riggs just reported, “The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy released a study last week that found the majority of arrestees in five metropolitan areas tested positive for marijuana at the time they were booked, and that many other arrestees tested positive for harder drugs. There was one drug missing from the report, however, and it appears it was omitted intentionally. That drug is alcohol.”

I still regularly meet people who believe that the laws governing us result from a deliberative process conducted by legislators committed to the public good. Such thinking will result in more crack-baby scares and the funding of new armies of social workers, planners, tax collectors, cops and regulators, who are more than happy to lobby for higher taxes and to meddle in our affairs.

The key to understanding the political system is found in this quotation from journalist and social critic H.L. Mencken: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

Crises

Members of the California Legislature, for example, specialize in looking for minuscule crises that they can blow out of proportion, then hold news conferences and push for new laws they author that help protect us, even as they steadfastly ignore the big problems (budgets, pensions, retiree medical liabilities) they themselves help to create.

So far this year, we have seen proposed new taxes on ammunition, on soft drinks and on clubs that sell alcohol and offer nude dancing. These taxes are meant to discourage certain behaviors and to protect us from ourselves, all while funding government “services.”

Government does this in all areas of our lives, including foreign policy, where unfounded scares justifying past U.S. intervention in another country will be forgotten in the face of some new supposedly menacing regime.

“Be outraged,” said former Assemblyman Chris Norby of Fullerton. “The crack-baby scare led to Draconian laws that cost billions and led to racially discriminatory drug laws.”

He is right, but most people will shrug, and many legislators will just keep doing what has always worked for them.

Steven Greenhut is vice president of journalism at the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity; write to him at: steven.greenhut@franklincenterhq.org.

By Chriss Street

In a stunning development, President-elect Enrique Pena and his Institutional Revolutionary Party, who won control of Mexico’s government on July 1, moved to dissolve the Agencia Federal de Investigación.  Modeled after the United States’ FBI, the AFI was founded in 2001 to crack down on Mexico’s pervasive government corruption and drug trafficking.

With rival drug cartels murdering between 47,500 to 67,000 Mexicans over the last six years, the move by the PRI represents the total surrender of Mexico’s sovereignty back to the money and violence of Mexico’s two main drug cartels, the Sinaloa Federation and Los Zetas.  Coupled with the Obama Administration’s “Dreamer” Executive Order curtailing deportations of illegal aliens, a hands-off policy on both sides of the border foreshadows a huge increase in “narco-trafficking” violence and corruption flooding into the United States.

The Institutional Revolutionary Party ruled Mexico with an iron fist for 71 years between 1929 and 2000.  Although the PRI claimed they were the socialist peasants’ party, they operated as a corrupt political organization that siphoned off wealth from Mexico’s nationalized oil industry with extracted bribes for protecting the drug cartels that trafficked in marijuana and narcotics distribution into the United States.  As a glaring example of the level of official PRI corruption, in 1982 the oil workers’ union donated a $2 million house as a “gift” to President López Portillo.  Mexicans often joke: “Our Presidents are elected as millionaires, but they leave office as billionaires.”

Mexico’s FBI

But on December 1, 2000, Vicente Fox, the former Chief Executive of Coca-Cola in Mexico and founder of the Partido Acción Nacional, was elected president of Mexico.  Fox ran on a platform of reforming Mexico’s pervasive police corruption and his first move as President was to form the AFI.  Under the leadership of Fox and his party’s successor, President Felipe Calderón, the AFI grew over the next 11 years into a 5,000-member force with an international reputation as a premier drug enforcement agency.  The U.S. provided extensive equipment and training to the AFI.  The AFI reciprocated by capturing numerous drug kingpins and extraditing them to face criminal prosecution for murder and drug distribution in the United States.

Over the first six months of 2012, the Sinaloa Federation and Los Zetas carried out a vicious war across Mexico to expand their areas of operations and intimidate the local population.  Both cartels engaged in “information operations campaigns” by displaying large numbers of dismembered bodies in public places.  The shock value of body dumps was designed to broadcast that the cartels are the dominant authority in Mexico.

Retaliation

The AFI under the Calderón retaliated against the major drug cartel kingpins’ horrific bloodshed by partnering with the United States and Guatemala to capture Horst Walther Overdick in Guatemala, followed by the capture of Francisco Trevino and Carlos Alejandro “El Fabiruchis” Gutierrez Escobedo and the killing of Gerardo “El Guerra” Guerra Valdez in Mexico, along with the capture of Jose Trevino in the United States.

Two days after the election, Pena came to the U.S. to announce that he would “welcome debate on the issue of drug legalization and regulation in Mexico.”  In an interview by PBS News Hour, Pena clearly stated:

 “I’m in favor of opening a new debate in the strategy in the way we fight drug trafficking.  It is quite clear that, after several years of this fight against drug trafficking, we have more drug consumption, drug use and drug trafficking. That means we are not moving in the right direction. Things are not working.”

These are “code words” to signal the PRI intends to cut a profitable deal with the cartels to legalize drugs in exchange for collecting tax revenue on drug sales.  The month before, Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., had called a congressional hearing to accuse Pena of advocating “a reversion” back to the old PRI policies of “turning a blind eye to the cartels” as long as they weren’t perpetrating grisly violence.

Pena’s announcement of the PRI’s new cozy relationship with the drug cartels directly followed President Obama’s announcement of his “Dreamer” Executive Order curtailing deportations of “undocumented” aliens.  These actions have caused major alarm among rank-and-file border agents that the Sinaloa Federation and Los Zetas are now unrestrained to flood into the United States with drugs and violence.  In a joint union press conference by the customs agents and the border patrol unions, Chris Crane, president of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Council, warned:

“It‘s impossible to understand the full scope of the administration’s changes, but what we are seeing so far concerns us greatly.… There is no burden for the alien to prove anything.”

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Chriss Street will be on “The Inside Education” Radio Talk Show,
Streaming Live from Tuesday July 31 to Friday August 3, from 8 to 9:30 PM.
Click Here to Listen:  http://www.mysytv.net/kmyclive.html