JAMES CARDONA: TAKING UP SPACE IN PRISON FOR POSSESSION OF POT

I am sure that the proponents of pot, along with the usual civil libertarians and prison reformers, would count James Cardona among the inmates who are taking up space in prison just for possession of pot. You hear it from them all the time:

__Our prisons are full of people doing time for pot possession. These people are not dangerous criminals. Imprisoning them costs the taxpayers a ton of money and contributes to the prison overcrowding problem and state budget deficits. Or criminal justice system would be better served if these people were made to pay a fine and do community service work, rather than imprisoned.

I learned about Cardona’s predicament - he had to close down his business and is serving a four-year prison term for Possession of Marijuana - when I read a story in Monday’s Houston Chronicle about the Ruta 14:6 Church’s new sanctuary, a building owned by James Cardona’s family.

So, poor old Jimmy lost everything, including his freedom, because he got caught with a few joints of pot. Well, NOT EXACTLY! Actually, good old Jimmy had used the building as an indoor marijuana plantation. When Drug Enforcement Agents raided his business in November 2009, Jimmy was growing 1,280 highly potent pot plants. The DEA estimates that Cardona was capable of producing up to $4 million a year of hydroponic marijuana, which sells for five times as much on the streets as Mexican grown marijuana.

According to Wendell Campbell, a spokesman for the Houston DEA office, “That place had it going on – it was an advanced, directed, orchestrated business … a very elaborate system to consistently produce good plants and ultimately push that marijuana into our local community. I do not see how one could be more sophisticated and most [other indoor growth facilities] are about half this size,"

So, how did Jimmy end up with only four years of prison time? His attorneys plea bargained the serious felony charges related to the manufacture and distribution of marijuana down to simple possession of pot. It seems likely that, as part of the bargain, he gave up a number of other people involved in his operation.

There was a time when pot users were sentenced to prison if they got caught holding a couple of joints. That has NOT been the case for the past 50 years. Our prisons are NOT full of people doing time because they got caught with some pot. That’s a lot of phony baloney and the proponents of pot, the civil libertarians and the prison reformers who keep spreading those lies damn well know it! They have succeeded in conning a gullible public absent of any knowledge about the facts behind the arrests of inmates imprisoned for possession of pot.

The public needs to be made aware that most prison inmates doing time for possession of pot were caught with very large amounts of marijuana and were in the business of dealing drugs. They plea bargained serious charges down to the less serious charge of possession in order to avoid a long prison sentence. And, unfortunately, in order to avoid the time and expense of a long trial, prosecutors are often eager to accept a plea bargain.