On alcohol vs. Marijuana: https://theintercept.com/2016/09/14/beer-pot-ballot/ https://theintercept.com/2016/09/14/beer-pot-ballot/ names a couple of instances.

On alcohol vs. Marijuana: https://theintercept.com/2016/09/14/beer-pot-ballot/ https://theintercept.com/2016/09/14/beer-pot-ballot/ names a couple of instances. Nearly 50% of federal prisoners are in on drug charges. For state it's 16%. There were 700k marijuana arrests in 2014 alone. It's not enough to explain our CJ issues by itself but it's very significant. And the subject here is not just explicit incarceration, it's profit motive associated with the criminal justice system: the CJ system is explicitly designed (among other things) as a deterrent system. Even if the number of (white) Marijuana users incarcerated is small, keeping it illegal pushes people away from it and towards the more dangerous drug, alcohol, according to some alcohol industry spokespeople at least, as per that article and many others. The concerns I have with the unions have nothing to do with their pushing for better funded and larger prisons to house the prisoners we do have (which they most certainly do as well). If you take the California example, they fought hard in favor of three strikes (and succeeded!), they were BY FAR (by 4x) the biggest donor to 'No on 5' in 08 (and succeeded!) Prison labor data is difficult to find -- I assume large companies aren't eager to make it known they use prison labor, but either way I'm just having trouble finding references with any kind of hard data at all positive or negative from a reasonable source. Whole foods made news when it stopped using prison labor. The BP oil spill was cleaned up in large part by inmates, not paid contractors or employees. AT&T laid off their call center workers and hired inmates in the 90s. Also, what is Pfaff?