Marijuana Laws Keep the Prisons Packed

“Put Muscle Behind Reform,” your April 15 editorial on California state prisons’ revolving door, was right on. We need lots of reform in California’s prisons. I urge you to back the measure to reform the three-strikes law. We have too many incarcerated for relatively minor infractions (marijuana possession, for example) because of the three-strikes law.

Since smoking is a killer and very costly for health facilities, why isn’t it illegal? It’s not illegal because we found that we needed to help people become individually responsible for themselves.

Let’s try to get a legislative commission on total prison and drug reform, and let’s put muscle behind it, Gov. Schwarzenegger. We know that governmental muscle greatly helped to reduce smoking; now let’s take aim at marijuana and reduce our prison crowd.

Virginia K. Huschke

La Quinta