Cynthia Powell was not an addict. She was not a dealer. She sold 35 of her diabetes pain pills to a confidential informant—for $300. Just enough to make ends meet that month. Next thing she knew, she was arrested, charged, and convicted. Her sentence? Watch to find out!
Share if you agree that mandatory sentences go too far.
Read her full profile here: http://famm.org/cynthia-powell/
But here is hope, these crazy mandatory sentences might be finally repealed. I timid first step has already been taken: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/state-politics/article134127879.html
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
Fedor Dostoevskii
Perhaps it would be more useful to look at the prison/legal industry. Its as rotten as anything else in th USSA . Lots of money being made from misery.
In Germany and most EU countries it is 10000% the other way around: They do not even arrest drugs dealers in Germany anymore, because Police knows all too well that they will have to release them after a few hours. It repeats and goes on like that day in and out. I’m talking about real drugs here. Hard drugs!
Also – rapsits, child rapists, murderers – they get very mild sentences and will be free in a few years (or less).
But if innocent mothers with small Babies refuse to pay NATO warmongering lies in Germany (even if they don’t even have a TV or radio), they get arrested with brute force:
RT-Germany: https://deutsch.rt.com/inland/47686-wegen-nicht-bezahlter-rundfunkgebuhren-mutter/
Getting arrested for 450 EUR: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8zN5f4ByI0
Mother shall be put into prison for refusing NATO-propaganda: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaqJZrV6yME
Related results:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=verhaftung+gez
Spread the word!
The Federal Republic of Germany is applying Nazi laws until this day.
Under USA’s leadership and occupation the 3rd Reich is being continued.
Proof (not much is availabe with English subs) :
Konrad Adenauer and the RE nazification of Germany in 1949
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pALk8hSut6A
Here is an English article on the GEZ “tax” you are talking about (akin to BBC license fee, but enforced by imprisonment). The tax began only very recently, in 2013
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2016/12/17/germans-risk-fines-jail-protest-public-tv-tax/95338958/
Thanks, but #1.) It isn’t a tax, even though it works like one. There are no valid laws for it.
And the often quoted “Rundfunkstaatsvertrag” (radio/TV state treaty) is firstly not a valid kaw in the federal level and secondly the real programs are 100% the opposite of of they should be according to their own rules.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beitragsservice_von_ARD,_ZDF_und_Deutschlandradio
And #2: It didn’t start on January 1st 2013. In fact GEZ ended on December 31st 2012.
It was renamed and must now be paid no matter if you have a device (Radio/TV) or not.
It is completely illegal for a number of reasons.
And not only private households have to pay it, also every corporation. For example reant-a-car services have to pay on a per car basis (every time again).
Even gardening parks somewhere deep in the woods have to pay it.
It is a completely unjustified highly criminal set of orders, rather than laws.
You then have to new that the “best” NATO warmongering anchors “earn” more than Madame Merkel (namely 300K per year and more).
While everybody has to pay for this insanity, including all the people below the poverty line (only some of the poorest unemployed Hartz4 persons can apply for a complicated and difficult to get exception).
The GEZ dates back to the 1920ties, but it was Hitler who turned it into a forced mandatory fee.
Even though not even Hitler dared to transfer it into an official tax.
They “earn” 8 Billion EUR per year!
It is the largest and most expensive war propaganda population replacement brain washing machine in the world.
Rupert Murdock, BBC or Fox-News are a joke compared to this.
The Spoils of War: Afghanistan’s Multibillion Dollar Heroin Trade
Washington’s Hidden Agenda: Restore the Drug Trade
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-spoils-of-war-afghanistan-s-multibillion-dollar-heroin-trade/91
The West’s Hypocrisy is that much digusting, there are no words for it.
Only machine gun bullets.
This is america since the raygun freakshow took control. It is sickening. War abroad, repression, serfdom/slavery and full prisons at home. This is what the right in pindoland is all about, has always been all about, making exploitation and institutionalized repression and abuse an expression of “freedom”.
Meanwhile the CIA profits from Afghani heroin.
Most of the intelligent world would not miss Washington, its authoritarian political class and their sadistic enforcers, if a huge tsunami washed them all away.
Selling drugs is a felony. A felony should net five years.
25 years is longer than manslaughter and other violent crimes.
This is incarceration as private industry sentencing.
I am against private industry prisons.
I am for roboticized prisons. No guards.
Violent crimes should get 30 years minimum.
yeah, and poaching endangered wildlife too – throw the keys away –
this sad story, as an old wrinkled dollar bill, has two facets at least: the individual and the system. the individual has a sad past of habit slavery from mother to daughter, the hood, NO JOBS, just surviving on the system’s handouts and eventually going the drain of drugs/illness/selling oneself and moral decadence. the system programmed, perpetrated, encouraged and enforced the pitiful status and behavior – its latest conclusion – everybody should be given a minimum handout, should be happy and quiet cause the AI and robots will take over us.
so, directly she is guilty by the laws made by the system but indirectly she’s a victim under the morals above the system.
over all it is a travesty, part of the mud of the swamp — sadly, no hope for drainage soon and time flies!
Americans need to vote for politicians who are “Soft on Crime”.
For decades, politicians who are “tough on crime” have campaigned on promises to increase sentences and to make everything illegal. Now its time to go the other direction.
Its now very common in America to hear of potential sentences of 20, 30 years or more in prison, and this is not for serious crimes like murder, rape or kidnapping. A part of the reason for this is to force people not to go to court for a trial. The prosecutors will offer a lessor sentence in a plea deal, but then threaten that if the person tries to go court to prove their innocence that they’ll face a 30 year sentence. Does wonders for the prosecutor’s conviction rates.
And you know, any politician who tries to eliminate or reduce these sorts of ridiculous sentences is going to be labeled during the campaign as being “Soft on Crime”. So, be ready for it. In order to move this nation back to some sort of sanity, we need to be deliberately looking for politicians who are accused of being “Soft on Crime” and supporting them. Vote for being “Softer on Crime”!
Why not just legalize crime? That way you remove the stigma and the attraction Americans have for it.
First we have to talk bout crime in terms of who the victim is. I don’t see any victim other the one in prison here. In case it seems that she had been left alone, without entrapment, no crime would have occurred.
Second we need to look at what prison does, both in terms of who gets rich off the system or who gets more power, and also how effective it is in maintaining law and order and protecting people (and that can be done in comparison to numbers of people and years of term in comparison to other nations and time periods, as well as other sociological factors).
One argument to make against this is that these ridiculous sentences put our police officers in more danger.
Attempting to injure or kill a police officer who’s doing their job should be a very serious offense. But in America, sentenences are now so high that almost anyone who’s facing arrest is now looking at potentially going to jail for 20 or 30 years. So, now there’s very little difference between what will happen to you if you try to shoot or injure that officer that’s trying to arrest you? Either way, you are spending at least decades in jail. Some might even regard a death penalty for killing a police officer as being somehow better than spending most of the rest of your life in jail. So, now, every time the police go to arrest someone for this sort of charge, they have to be worried that the person they are arresting might be disturbed enough at facing decades in a vile, nasty prison that they might just do anything to try to escape.
If I’m a cop, I’d rather that someone who’s facing this sort of charge would clearly know that if they surrender easily that they only get a couple of years in jail. And also know that if they take a shot at a police officer its going to get a whole lot worse.
And, its funny how we tend to talk about “only” spending a couple of years in jail. A couple of years in a nasty Florida prison would seem like forever until it finally ended.
Trump’s always talking about how he wants to support the police. How about making our police safer by some sort of sane sentencing reform?
The American people have become just another natural resource to exploit. The best kind, actually, because they are self-renewing (or were, until recently).
“Pass a law, make a business.” — Catherine Austin Fitts
Like every other intere$t group, enough money i$ given to lawmaker$ by the prison-indu$trial complex to en$ure that it get$ a $teady $stream of inmate$, guaraneeing full employment for everyone dependent on the $y$tem, and with room for expan$ion (prison$ built and $taffed by corporation$). Inmate labor is even contracted to bu$ine$$es that rely on thi$ to keep co$t$ low.
If the $upply run$ low, the $olution i$ $imple : make more thing$ criminal offen$e$.
Like CAF said, every new law (and all old ones) creates a busine$$ opportunity.
This is not “free enterprise” — It is $lave Enterpri$e.
Copied from the Soviet Gulag system, I should add, which was an important segment of the economy. This is not a USA vs. Soviet Union issue : Everybody’s sh*t stinks.
This case doesn’t surprise me at least. It’s typical for the US system. Entrapment, misleading, cheating and stealing seems to be the modus operandi of everyday life in the US. Probably many people may remember those “old” movies depicting female police officers disguising as hookers in order to arrest potential customers. That system is also used to get “pedophiles” and “terrorists”. I guess I had read some stories on the website of The Rutherford Institute (https://www.rutherford.org) that show how effed up the whole system is.
Police officers posing on the internet as underage girls, using phony explanations and trying to urge their online acquaintance for a personal encounter. Another way is using pictures of underage girls that look full age and telling the online contact they’re already of full age. (In my opinion that’s definitely not the way to discover the real perverts who should be behind bars.)
For identifying “terrorists” undercover agents had been pushing mentally unstable persons into buying weapons (even loaning them money if they weren’t able to come up with enough of themselves) for pre-planned (pre-planned by the agents) “attacks”.
If police / attorneys are rewarded with promotion or pay-rise for the amount of their arrests / convictions, then the whole idea of checks and balances of executive / judiciary is doomed to fail. Those “public servants” should be rewarded for quality instead of quantity.
Another incentive for as many arrests and convictions as possible is the slave labor employed by private prisons. Thanks to all the prisoners the US seems to have a competitive edge over Chinese labor (http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-prison-industry-in-the-united-states-big-business-or-a-new-form-of-slavery/8289). Aside from large companies those “slaves” are also needed for work for which communities aren’t able to pay municipal employees. Thanks to the race to the bottom in which we’re participating there’s hardly any money left for regular municipal workers.
Also a great way for generating profits is the use of asset forfeiture. Probably people outside of the US may have the hardest laugh whilst watching John Oliver’s take on that situation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kEpZWGgJks (The stories of the purchases of an ice resurfing machine or a Margarita machine are hilarious.)
Always remember: Money, money over everything …! (Merge the previous text with the tunes of some musical composition by Joseph Haydn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOuopL-zkHA) To keep the money flowing you always need fresh supply for the prison system. Is there any better way to convict people to extremely harsh sentences and / or criminalizing such things as man spreading? Just imagine, … once you get some have-not to do prison time, because he/she can’t pay the fine for some BS misdemeanor like jaywalking, you can easily add some further prison time for some other absurdity – not following orders of prison guards, etc. If you’ve got some spare money, so that you can afford a lawyer you may be exempt from prison labor (for example: Robert H. Richards, Ethan Couch, …).
The system of our Western Democracies is Law and Order. And many people seem to appreciate and support it. Many also seem to appreciate harsh punishment for revenge – at least when it affects others.
With regard to the comment of the first Anonymous in this thread:
… They do not even arrest drugs dealers in Germany anymore, …
Which news sources are you using? Bild? Your statement is utter nonsense.
The story about refusal of paying the fees for public-service broadcasting lacks some information. Your statements are misleading as well. Mother shall be put into prison for refusing NATO-propaganda: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaqJZrV6yME
You forgot to mention that the mother of your second example has won the case. She doesn’t have to go to prison (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85irUnYRQTw).
Whilst RT is amongst the more reliable news sources it isn’t without bias/slant either. Ever since the start of RT Deutsch it lacked the professionalism of the English version. There are some really good coverages, but there are bad ones as well. The report of RT Deutsch (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaqJZrV6yME) belongs to the latter ones. Maria Janssen, the journalist covering the story, didn’t bother to check if it’s legal to refuse the payments for public-service broadcasting. She also didn’t ask for any correspondence between authorities and the mother who refused to pay. (I don’t like when people block sideways with their cars or the German government giving VW a free pass with the emissions scandal, but I would never think of stopping paying motor vehicle tax because of that.)
Most countries have laws. Some of them are reasonable, others are a load of rubbish. For living in a society / community rules are needed. Greed, favoritism, corruption and the resulting inequality by misrepresenting and distortion of laws destroy societies.
Prior to 1 January 2013 personal households had to pay either for radio (5,76 EUR/month) or TV (17,98 EUR/month). For example in the case of a family with two adult children (older than 18 years) with their own respective incomes, the “original couple” had to pay fees and the adult children as well – if they owned a radio or TV. (Basically each car owner also was / is owner of a radio.)
Since 1 January 2013 the situation for personal households has changed. The fee is payed per apartment. People with a secondary residence or a vacation home have to pay for the first residence and the second. Whilst the family of the first example may save money a single person with a first and secondary residence has to pay more than previously.
If you don’t like any laws at all, you might consider moving to Somalia. Since the destruction of that country no real administration has emerged. But be careful, you may have to arrange with local warlords and to abide their rules (laws).
There never was a “re-Nazification” of Germany, because a real de-Nazification hadn’t been undertaken. The existence of GEZ doesn’t imply that the country is still ruled by the National socialists. Is the existence of a tax on spirits (Branntweinsteuer) proof that Germany is still ruled by monarchs (Kaiser)?
Getting back to the original topic of Cynthia Powell. Wouldn’t it be reasonable to rethink drug laws? When were drugs banned and why were they banned in the first place? Criminalizing addicts doesn’t solve the problem. Criminalizing drug dealers results in shortages and thus increasing prizes for drugs, infighting of drug dealers and deaths of lots of innocent uninvolved people. What about all that money that’s being made with drugs? Who is managing all that money? Why aren’t those involved in managing / laundering the money tried and sent to prison? Could it be that following the money inevitably would lead to the big banks? I’ll end my comment with these questions. Answer them for yourselves.