The Canadian province of Quebec has stated that the US state of Michigan is guilty of enforcing laws that fail to live up to the standards of human decency. This is resulting from Michigan’s Zero Tolerance drug laws. The law, which has been called the harshest in the nation would put a first time offender behind bars for life, without parole, for possession of 650 grams of cocaine or more with intent to sell.

This law is part of the ‘mandatory minimums’ system of drug enforcement that is popular in many US states. That a first time offender can be jailed for that length of time without parole is not only unbelievable it is also immoral and inhuman.

The law was apparently introduced to target Drug Kingpins, but a rational look at the policy clearly points out that this law is actually aimed at low-level dealers. Most of whom will obviously be young people living in inner-city slums and the like. Here is a list of the graded mandatory minimum sentences:

If this policy truly were aimed at major drug dealers the minimum amount for life in prison would be set much higher as drug kingpins are unlikely to deal in amounts which could easily be carried by one person in a small bag.

To paraphrase Winston Churchill: The truest measure of a society is how it treat’s it’s prisoners.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 7th, 2007 at 7:07 am PST and is filed under US Injustice, Government Injustice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.