SD ACLU wants to empty the prisons & will try decriminalizing drug crimes to do so.

Pat Powers

From the Rapid City Journal, the South Dakota chapter of the ACLU wants to make changes to how many people are jailed for drug crimes. And despite the rising problem of meth in our communities, the ACLU makes decriminalization the centerpiece of their plan:

The South Dakota report is based on prison-term data from the National Corrections Reporting Program. According to the report, policies would need to change to reduce the number of people admitted to the correctional system, the amount of time prisoners serve, and racial and ability disparities.

and..

“Drug offenses are taking up a lot of our state resources. We are incarcerating a lot of people for drug offenses, and a lot of those are low-level felonies,” Skarin said. “It’s not this narrative of, ‘Oh, we’re locking up drug kingpins and people who have meth labs.’ That’s not what’s going on in South Dakota.”

Skarin said the report’s addressing concerns of people being incarcerated for lower-level drug offenses lines up with a study the state Legislature began Monday.

To whittle down the number of prisoners further, the ACLU suggests the state build on the Public Safety Improvement Act’s reforms. Proposed changes include expanding the application of presumptive probation, reducing the number of people who have their probation or parole revoked due to technicalities, reducing the range of possible sentences for crimes and decriminalizing personal drug use and possession, as South Dakota is one of the only states that prosecutes non-dealers caught with drugs with felony charges.

and..

“I am under no illusion that our legislators are going to look at this report and say, ‘Well, let’s just implement all of this,'” she said. “It’s supposed to be more of a picture of what’s possible.”

Read it all here.

Because the provisions of 2013’s Senate Bill 70 have been embraced so warmly in South Dakota, they want to expand on it? I think there’e a number of County Sheriffs who would disagree. The problems haven’t disappeared, they’ve just been dumped on the counties.

Decriminalizing drugs for such as meth for personal drug use and possession isn’t going to make our neighborhoods safer. It’s just going to cause more headaches, and leave local law enforcement to deal with the headaches they’ll cause with being weak on crime.

13 thoughts on “SD ACLU wants to empty the prisons & will try decriminalizing drug crimes to do so.”

  1. Liberals are always doing stupid stuff like this. Good thing South Dakota has video lottery and civil asset forfeiture to pay for all this socialism.

  2. All these stats from the ACLU and UJS do not account for all the probationers that are coddled and never violated 10 times despite the promises we were given with SB 70…our AG is right & the ACLU is wrong —there is no stick anymore…..

  3. At this rate the ACLU is going to want us to write apology letters…smh

  4. So you want to keep doing what hasn’t worked? Have you heard that saying about the definition of insanity?

  5. This was a debate during the second eight years of Bill Janklow. He maintained that the statistic that drug offenses accounted for the majority of incarcerated people was bogus. Why? He said that many of them were arrested for other crimes; e.g., theft, assault, etc., and that the drug convictions were either added on to the other crimes or were used instead of the non-drug charges when allocution and sentencing happened. Don’t know whether that’s true in the aggregate, but we all know that what a person is convicted of isn’t always what their only – or even most serious – crime was.

    I would hope that at least some researchers into criminal justice would have the ability and use the screening process to determine the true causes of incarceration.

  6. No to changes in the ingestion law. Law enforcement needs tools they can to hold those accountable for their actions so they can get the help they need and public safety.

    1. What’s illegal in backwards SD isn’t illegal everywhere. Smoking pot two states away and being charged with “possession” while on a vacation to SD three weeks later is simply idiotic. Law enforcement in SD isn’t concerned with getting people help, they just wanna “bust the baddies”.

      1. good–I am sick and tired of the HUG A THUG, pander to the drug users mentality —

        Then the do gooders don’t fund any treatment anyway…so we all suffer with more drug users in society breaking in to our houses and assaulting people to feed their habits…..

  8. South Dakota is allergic to change and will be a living museum someday.

    Colorado is progressive and there are no problems here with more money than we know what to do with.

    Rocky mountain high!

  9. legalize meth + fentanyl and we won’t need to worry much about overpopulation. Instead, we’ll need to worry about clearing the pile of emaciated corpses from our sidewalks, parks, and playgrounds.

    It’s poison. Don’t go near it. Warn your kids.

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