Sacramento Homeless blog

This comes from an opinion piece titled " Decriminalizing Poverty ," written by Bruce Western, in the Dec. 27, 2010, issue of The Nation [emphases mine]: In the absence of any serious effort to improve economic opportunity, particularly among young men with little schooling, drug control has become our surrogate social policy . For all the billions spent on draconian criminalization, addiction remains a scourge of the disadvantaged in inner cities and small towns, drugs are still plentiful and the drug trade remains a ready but risky source of casual employment for low-education men and women with no legitimate prospects. Though drugs are at the center of an array of serious social problems in low-income communities, things are made worse by a dysfunctional policy in which arrest, imprisonment and a criminal record have become a normal part of life . The most important lesson policy-makers can take from this historic failure of social engineering is that the drug proble...