Saturday, July 31, 2010

Conrad Black: The Birth of a Liberal?

Conrad Black reflects, after two years inside the U.S. penal system:

"In my 28 months as a guest of the US government, I often wondered how my time in that role would end. I never expected that I would have to serve the whole term, though I was, and am, psychologically prepared to do so," he wrote in the piece that discussed his final hours behind bars.

"Now that I have learned more of the fallibility of American justice, which does convict many people, who, like me, would never dream of committing a crime in a thousand years," he wrote.

...Black also spoke of seeing "the failure of the US War on Drugs, with absurd sentences, (including 20 years for marijuana offences, although 42 percent of Americans have used marijuana and it is the greatest cash crop in California)."

A trillion dollars, he noted, have been spent on the effort by US authorities, but the only result has been illegal substances in question being "more available and of better quality than ever, while producing countries such as Colombia and Mexico are in a state of civil war."

- Garry J. Wise, Toronto

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3 comments:

  1. They say is conservative is a former liberal that who got mugged. Perhaps a liberal is a former conservative who got sent to jail.

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  2. I think this year Mr. Black was running down Harper's 'tough on crime'

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  3. I don't know whether to laugh or to cry ... but at least this is one guy who realizes what most of us have said for years, the war on drugs is a joke.

    Increasing the prison population five times over thirty years and bringing many states to the brink of bankruptcy was not smart public policy. Go after the kingpins by all means. But the idea a single joint means a long prison sentence is just wrong.

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