Editors, Opelika-Auburn News:

Another day, another prison overcrowding crisis.

Sen. Zeb Little has introduced a law to ensure that convicts of heinous offenses including murder and sexual torture, stay in prison for 85% of their assigned sentences (AP, Prison population swells).

But there are worries. Why? Alabama’s prison system is jammed to the gills, and facing an April 1 deadline to make space for the state inmates illegally jammed into county lockups.

Despite all this, Alabama is using your tax dollars to imprison over 4,200 drug offenders, nearly 1 out of every 6 Alabama prisoners. Thanks to mandatory minimum sentencing laws, nearly 60% of those drug offenders will be in prison for ten years or more. No wonder we can’t find space for 2,000 inmates!

Siegelman and the bipartisan parrots in the legislature want to deal with Alabama’s prison crisis by throwing more of our tax dollars down the Drug War drain with an $8,000,000 prison plan expanding prisons and creating extensive new programs.

But why should we keep throwing more people into an expanding prison system, when that’s what landed us in this crisis in the first place? Why should we have to worry where to find the space for violent criminals to spend their sentences? Why should we pay millions of dollars to maintain Alabama’s insane War on Drugs while we can’t find space for murders, child rapists, and sexual torturers?

Gubernatorial candidate John Sophocleus and the Libertarian Party are fighting for solutions to prison overcrowding that the old goats on Goat Hill won’t touch: stop throwing away our tax dollars, release Alabama’s 4,200 prisoners of the Drug War, and repeal the insane drug laws that created this crisis. Then we’ll have space to keep real criminals behind bars for their whole sentence.

O.K., so I took my computer in for several fixes, including getting the Ethernet card, hence my Internet access from my normal computer, working again. Hopefully I should be back up to speed in a few more days, although being in a seminar course on Kant and four other courses may slow down the posting schedule.

In the meantime, I offer you the Geek Hierarchy 2.0 [Brunching Shuttlecocks]. I’m not sure exactly where I fall in anymore (in junior high school I was a confirmed Trekkie, but most of my current geekiness is not located on the hierarchy).

So, I’m back from Europe, and back from Texas. Have been for a few days. My classes have started. I was going to make a long post about all that, and also the fact that my computer’s network card is temporarily busted, and that my posting schedule will be a bit disrupted until that’s fixed. And various other things which will, I suppose, eventually posted.

Except that after I spent a half hour or so on it, Blogger ate my post, due to a scheduled maintenance of which I was not informed until all the work was already lost. Damn it.

Anyway, my network card is indeed busted. It will, hopefully, be working soon. And I may be switching my weblog over to MovableType sometime in the near future. We’ll see. Anyway, hopefully more or less regular postings will resume once the computer is up and running.

Update 2004/04/18: made some minor updates to fix typos.

This LTE was published in January 2002.

Editors, Opelika-Auburn News:

It has been a pleasure to see that Libertarians are organizing a growing, well-organized independent party in Alabama. The Republocrats are so scared, they’ve pushed through some of the harshest ballot-access laws in the nation in order to shut out anyone outside of their Good Ol’ Boys’ club. But you can’t fool all of the people all of the time, and the Libertarians are taking them to task this campaign year.

It was even more pleasing to see (AU professor running for governor, OA News, 1/8/2002) that the Libertarian Party is pushing for some common-sense solutions that the Montgomery establishment refuses to touch. For example, Libertarian Party gubernatorial candidate John Sophocleus agrees that Alabama should address its prison overcrowding problem by repealing laws on victimless crimes and removing inmates serving sentences for those crimes, which … include drug use.

Last year Alabama’s prisons were so overcrowded that the Department of Corrections faced a court order forcing the them to find places for the 2,000 state inmates illegally jammed into overcrowded county jails. Instead of using our tax dollars to build more prisons, Alabama’s government should rethink its overzealous involvement in the so-called War on Drugs. Thanks to Alabama’s drug Prohibition, state prisons hold over 4,000 people convicted of nonviolent drug crimes. Mandatory minimum sentencing laws require that, depending on the type of drug involved, these inmates will stay in prison for anywhere from three to nineteen years.

If nonviolent drug offenders were released from prison, and the insane drug laws which put them there were repealed, Alabama wouldn’t have a prison population crisis. It’s about time Libertarians and other candidates outside of the two-party system got the chance to challenge the old goats on Goat Hill and work for these kind of solutions for the citizens of Alabama.