Pubdate: Sun, 31 Mar 2002
Source: San Francisco Chronicle (CA)
Copyright: 2002 Hearst Communications Inc.
Contact:  http://www.sfgate.com/chronicle/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/388
Author: Daniel Thompson

SUPREME GUILT BY ASSOCIATION

Editor -- So, now a generation of senior citizens that grew up with 
segregation and is currently living in public housing is to be made 
homeless because their grandkids or caregivers use drugs somewhere else. 
And a college student who smokes a joint can become ineligible for student 
loans; that's a penalty neither rapists, murderers nor thieves must face.

This country has the world's largest prison population, and more than half 
of them are nonviolent drug offenders.

The recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling penalizing people simply because 
they're related to an alleged criminal, is not dissimilar to the pre- Civil 
War edict that any man in a free state could be forced to help capture a 
runaway slave. That law was eventually repealed as a result of popular 
protest; one can only hope that this madness ends the same way.

DANIEL THOMPSON San Francisco 
- ---
MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom