It is 2019. America is the land of the free, and when it comes to marijuana that means thirty-three states allowing medical marijuana and eleven states legalizing it for recreational use. This, however, has not brought freedom back to the tens of thousands of Americans who have been charged with marijuana possession. Many of these people are incarcerated in private for-profit prisons that lobby their interests to government representatives. This industry has a heavy interest in keeping as many prisoners as possible. These prisons would lose a large amount of future and current inmates if marijuana were to become legal federally. Prisons lobbying to ruin many lives so that their own can benefit seems to be at odds with the ethical principle of utilitarianism. The for-profit prison system in America lobbies to maintain laws that are beneficial to them, keep marijuana illegal and offenders in jail, and violates the ethical theory of utilitarianism.
The ethical issue we’re faced with is this private for-profit prison industry has been employing lobbyists to coerce politicians into making laws more favorable to their interests. Doing this continues support of the very laws that encourage people to make money off of those incarcerated over something so many have legal access to nowadays. Out of the 1,632,921 drug-related arrests made in 2017, 40.4% were because of marijuana. Nearly 50% of the people arrested for drug law violations that year happened to be African American or Latino. Our policymakers now are faced with solving the issue of these overpopulated prisons along with the racial inequality adding to it. “To this day, legions of Black men, women, and children are incarcerated—and left with criminal records barring them from working in the legal industry—for consuming, possessing and, yes, selling, the very same “plant” now being more widely embraced.”
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The marijuana business has been blooming ever since it was first medically legalized in California back in 1996. With over a thousand dispensaries opened across the U.S. with a “$4.0-$4.5 billion” industry employing “between 165,000 and 230,000 full and part-time workers” as of 2016 this medicinal plant is becoming less of a taboo for Americans. Even with these growths in figures, not everyone is on board with changing the laws about getting caught with a little weed. With marijuana still fully illegal in seventeen states, our nation continues to add to our already overflowing prisons, targeting minorities the worst and thus changing their lives from then on. “As the growth of the prison population reached levels that were well beyond those anyone had anticipated and that few believed were needed, the literature about the U.S. prison system has shifted to emphasize deep concerns about the wisdom of our burgeoning prison population.”
This practice of for-profit prisons lobbying for laws that are beneficial to them at the detriment of hundreds of thousands of citizens is in clear contrast to the ethical theory of utilitarianism. This is the theory that what we do morally should create the most good for the most people. In terms of legislation, if a law is oppressive or harms more people than it helps it can be considered an unjust law. Responsible cannabis users are not harming those in their communities and in some cases are helping their quality of life medically.
In conclusion, my opinion on this issue is that for-profit prisons are an unjust practice overlooked by the majority of the American population. It’s a system that laughs in the face of the theory of utilitarianism and also in the faces of the many people whose lives have been ruined, many of them due to associating with a harmless plant called marijuana.
Works Cited
- Clear, Todd R., and James Austin. “Reducing Mass Incarceration: Implications of the Iron Law of Prison Populations.” Harvard Law & Policy Review, vol. 3, no. 2, July 2009, pp. 307–324.
- Manias, Nicholas, et al. Ethics Applied. 8th ed., Pearson, 2018.
- Whitfield, Chandra Thomas. “Being Mary Janes.” Culture, June 2018, p. 18.
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