4 ms·
As someone with a friend who, in a different state and different circumstances, foolishly was detained on a road trip in a state with a strict no-tolerance poli
by 616c 13y ago
As someone with a friend who, in a different state and different circumstances, foolishly was detained on a road trip in a state with a strict no-tolerance policy, was subsequently arrested and tried by some small prick DA in the middle of nowehre to teach a lesson with his "sorry, I don't make exceptions because we want to look hard on drugs" apologism, I hope decriminalization succeeds at least in the short term.
That friend had trouble finding work and grad school for years because this haunted him, and everyone asks in advance about your criminal record. It was all over a dime bag, and using crooked legal tactics.
Another friend, reminiscent of an article previously posted here, was in the Midwest (we grew up on the East Coast) and stopped for a busted headlight. They then found a negligible amount of weed. He was detained and then arrested on the spot. He was told he either call his parents, as he was a minor, and to pay a wopping 1,000 USD fine, or face charges and a court date, in which case pleading innocent and receiving a guilty verdict would mean doubled fines and potential jail time. You can guess what his parents did when they got that phone call in the middle of the night.
And don't worry, they never had a problem scrubbing this from their record, as youths who had fun. Their record would never ruin their adult (+21) lives, no?
All I have to say is, what the hell is wrong with us as society we penalize people so harshly (let's not kid, the non-white kids I knew got worse variations of these stories) for something so much less powerful than alcohol (I would love to see someone argue with me re this point after four years in the very wet college environment in contemporary America)?
Screw it. I hope this guy, and those like him win. But there is something so disgustingly Puritan and fascist, I feel myself working up the "he was a real reactonary" voice of Big Lebowski, full of snark.
Sorry, end rant.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- victorf 13y agoThe mental trauma of being in a US prison and permanent unemployability from a felony record causes far more hardship to a person than the act of smoking. That alone should indicate that the punishment is not fitting the crime.
- bjourne 13y agoWhy don't employers want to hire people who have smoked weed?
- arbuge 13y agoCriminal records never look good on a background check. For a substance which is probably less dangerous than cigarettes and alcohol, they shouldn't be there in the first place. Regulate it like cigarettes and alcohol, but don't criminalize it.
- brazzy 13y agoThey don't care what the "crime" was, a criminal record just disqualifies you. It's the same kind of HR idiocy that would forego hiring someone who has 5 years of Rails experience but did not list HTML as a skill, because HTML is in the checklist.
- bjourne 13y agoThe reason for that is because HR departments doesn't know the difference between RoR and HTML and therefore doesn't think someone lacking the latter is capable of performing the job. Ignorance in other words. Are you claiming it is the same kind of ignorance that causes companies to not hire weed smokers?
- brazzy 13y agoI think both have the same root cause: not ignorance but laziness. Bad HR people tasked with filtering resumes don't want to hire the best people, they want to do as little work (and as little thinking) as possible while appearing to do a useful job. So they just love rules that filter a lot of resumes, can be applied without thinking and make superficial sense. Understanding how skills relate is more work than comparing lists, looking at the specifics of a criminal conviction is more work that just using it as a binary exclusion criterium.