Thanks, stardust, for reminding us that the incarceration industry has stakeholders. It's clear the war on drugs is out of control when lawmakers propose different mandatory sentences for crack cocaine than for the white powdery stuff that gets snorted through 100-dollar bills.

I'm doing a bit of speculating here but I've heard that people do that on the internet sometimes, so here goes. If I was an employer who wanted badly to keep marijuana users out of my workforce I might want to see pot legalized rather than to deal with the medical marijuana situation in California.
There is no test that I have heard of that will show whether a person has smoked recently enough to be affected. They only show that the person has smoked, maybe thirty days prior. That means if a person smokes on Friday night and goes to work stone sober and well rested on Monday at a place which forbids employment to drug users, that person would test positive and could be fired.
 In California anyone can get a doctors prescription for medical marijuana to treat a hangnail. I assume that you cannot be fired for having taken a prescription medicine.
 I support legalization because I think that pot can be used and enjoyed conscientiously and so it should be my choice, but I don't expect that legalization will solve all the problems created by its long time demonization and criminalization.
  And as has been said, making prisons a for-profit operation is responsible for a lot of the incarceration.

that in places like West and East Baltimore, where the drug economy is now the only factory still hiring and where the educational system is so crippled that the vast majority of children are trained only for the corners...

That about says it all!!

We maintain that slavery was abolished in this country in 1865, but we currently have three million folks who are really slaves residing in our prisons and another five million who carry around the badges of slavery with no right to vote, little chance for decent employment, and really imprisoned in our most dilapitated urban centers.

And in those urban centers we are training more and more children for the corners.

Won't have a lot of time to discuss further and don't have time to do the topic the justice necessary, but I would like to quickly try to point out that as regards this

For those of us concerned about our nation’s Cradle to Prison Pipeline® crisis

from that page this is what Alexander supports

Black Leaders Address the Mass Incarceration of Youth

The Black Community Crusade for Children (BCCC) is committed to dismantling the pipeline to prison through education and by expanding programs that work such as the CDF Freedom Schools® program and replicating the Harlem Children’s Zone model in other communities through the Promise Neighborhoods Initiative. During a meeting in December 2010, Black leaders gathered at CDF Haley Farm to discuss the problems Black youth face and promising approaches. Watch new videos from the convening where author Michelle Alexander addresses the devastating impact that the mass incarceration of Black men is having on communities and Judith Browne-Dianis of the Advancement Project discusses zero tolerance policies in schools.

And it is also what Arne Duncan/the Obama administration and the charter school movement supports and which most teachers' unions and their national voices do NOT support:

charter schools — a cornerstone of the Obama administration’s education strategy — are facing resistance across the country, as they become more popular and as traditional public schools compete for money. The education scholar Diane Ravitch, once a booster of the movement, is now an outspoken critic.

What is causing the push-back on charter schools, beyond the local issues involved ? Critics say they are skimming off the best students, leaving the regular schools to deal with the rest? Is that a fair point?

Note that the Diane Ravitch cited above is the education scholar that American Dreamer has posted on here at Dagblog as regards the unions/teachers topic. She disagrees with the Alexander/Harlem Children;'s Zone types.

Would like to point out that the case is that it's not "solidarity forever" as regards many inner city activists and teachers' unions as to solving the problem of "the prison pipeline;" there is strong disagreement and has been for a long time. And that some of the most vociferous complaints about city teachers' unions has come from inner city activists, as well as some of the most vociferous support for school vouchers and charter schools in order to address the "prison pipeline" problem.

I personally know that this debate has been going on for a very long time as regards the inner city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where there is still quite a bit of a 'ghetto' problem and the disagreements about public education and experimentation with vouchers and charters for inner city youth. Like decades.  And since then, I have a brother who ended up working as coach in Milwauke Archdiocesan schools with mostly minority students attending on vouchers, so I personally hear about the difference in the types of schools.

And this is also the reason I noted a lot of anger at teachers in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel comments when the Wisconsin union protest story was breaking because I knew of this division between minority progressive education activists and teachers unions for quite some time. For which I got grief from Sleepin' Jeezus, he didn't want to hear about it, he wanted only positive happy solidarity things being posted. Nothing about no inner city Milwaukee people being unhappy with the public education system. So I just let it lay and didn't bring it up again. But I'm bringing it up now, because you supplied the basic background in your post.

To simplify and generalize a complex problem to get my point across: there's a division in this country about education reform, with a lot of inner city activists and Obama types on the one side, and public school teachers' unions on the other. And it's a life and death argument for some of the former, because it's all about "the prison pipeline" problem. That there's a separate war on specifically teachers' unions and no other unions going on, and it's one that has nothing to do with the Koch Brothers, but rather, some inner city activists who don't want to sit and wait for public school reform in their area any longer with many of t heir children ending up in prison. Maybe this particular rap on the teachers' unions is unfair, but pretending it's not there is not realistic.

Another quickie. People often talk about "millions" of people being in prison in the U.S. without any concept of the real actual size of the problem, leaving it loom large like a bogeyman without any real perspective.

I think it's helpful to have a concept of the size and when the change in proportion occured.

Here's Pew Center for the States on the prison population, with the numbers, and suggesting something is starting to happen:

Prison Count 2010: State Population Declines for the First Time in 38 Years

For the first time in nearly 40 years, the number of state prisoners in the United States has declined, according to "Prison Count 2010," a new survey by the Pew Center on the States.  As of January 2010, there were 1,404,053* persons under the jurisdiction of state prison authorities, 4,777* fewer than on December 31, 2008.

This marks the first year-to-year drop in the nation's state prison population since 1972.  While the study showed an overall decline, it revealed great variation among jurisdictions.  The prison population declined in 26* states, while increasing in 24* states and in the federal system.

In the past few years, several states have enacted reforms designed to get taxpayers a better return on their public safety dollars.  These strategies included:

    * • Diverting low-level offenders and probation and parole violators from prison
      • Strengthening community supervision and re-entry programs
      • Accelerating the release of low-risk inmates who complete risk reduction programs

From the first PDF on that page, "Prison Count 2010," a 12-pager, the Federal numbers and the historic trends:

The federal count rose by 6,838 prisoners, or 3.4 percent in 2009, to an all-time high of 208,118....

Prior to 1972, the number of prisoners had grown at a steady rate that closely tracked growth rates in the general population. Between 1925 (the first year national prison statistics were officially collected) and 1972, the number of state prisoners increased from 85,239 to 174,379.2
S
tarting in 1973, however, the prison population and imprisonment rates began to rise precipitously. This change was fueled by stiffer sentencing and release laws and decisions by courts and parole boards, which sent more offenders to prison and kept them there for longer terms.3 In the nearly five decades between 1925 and 1972, the prison population increased by 105 percent; in the four decades since, the number of prisoners grew by 705 percent.4 Adding local jail inmates to state and federal prisoners, the Public Safety Performance Project calculated in 2008 that the overall incarcerated population had reached an all-time high, with 1 in 100 adults in the United States living behind bars.5.....

So it's approximately 1 in 100 adults that are incarcerated, not 1 in 100 of our entire population. And it's an approximate total of 1.6 million, states and Feds combined. And if you look at that PDF, you'll see the number is going down in some states and going up in others, and learn about what's been working as regards that and what hasn't.