Current criminal justice

The United States has been plagued with the issue of marijuana use for quite some time. The current policy set in place requires the use of many resources to deal with such a minor defiance. As of now, courts are backlogged because of the high number of arrests for minor offenses. Many are arrested, processed, and sent to county jail to wait for a bond hearing, and after some time they are finally able to appear in front of a judge to enter a plea or go to trial. This process causes time and money to be wasted. This paper will detail the five steps of implementing an improved policy for handling illegal possession of marijuana under one-ounce and possession of paraphernalia.

[...] reports that the hundreds of thousands of marijuana arrests each year costs more than eight billion dollars in criminal justice costs, in addition to the one billion dollar costs for incarcerating violators per year. Focus on the topic of severity of the marijuana issue must also reflect the statistics of possession versus sale. Armentano (Armentano p. also reports that Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) statistics revealed that of the nearly 800,000 marijuana arrests in 2005, nearly 90% of the arrests were for possession only. [...]

[...] Assuming more than 100 people a year are arrested, tried, and sentenced with these conditions, the criminal justice system pays an astounding minimum of three million dollars per year for simple possession. This hemorrhage of funds cannot continue. Agenda Setting Setting the agenda for reducing possession or use of marijuana under federal law begins with demonstrating support of the public through advertising the initiative in the media. As president Clinton did with the Brady Bill, using the media to promote an agenda is best done with the introduction of props (Marion & Oliver p. [...]