These politicians have been using the paradoxical love/hate relationship that conservatives have with their government in order to manipulate the discussion of drug policy (among other things) in America for the last forty years. The "father knows best" attitude of many conservatives, sharply contrasts with their fear of "big daddy" government, especially where punishment of drug users is concerned.
Conservatives love their country, but their love is that of a child for the authoritarian parent: deathly afraid that if they do anything wrong, they will lose that love, and be cast out of that parent's life, perhaps forever. This fear is what is at the heart of their "lock 'em up, and throw away the key" attitude towards America's justice system: What they are afraid will happen to them if they fail to lead a life of moral rectitude, they feel should happen to those who do fail, as a warning to themselves and others.
At the same time, many of these conservatives in America are also very often fundamentalist Christians, whose belief system is (supposedly) based on individual redemption through faith. They should be among the first to seek out the redemption and return to society of prisoners, especially those whose only crime was having too much pot on their persons.
Instead, too many conservatives of every ilk believe in an idea of punitive retribution as the only means to extirpate sin from the sinner, until such a time that the sinner accepts their narrow view of the World and salvation.
"Got a wife in Chino, babe,
and one in Cherokee
First one says she's got my child,
but it don't look like me."
"Friend of the Devil," American Beauty,
Grateful Dead, 1970
War "on" a thing is so nebulous, non-specific, and open-ended a term that it can be used to cover a multitude of issues that even its creators can never fully comprehend or understand when it is over, if it is ever over. A war that is against something is specific: whether it is against a nation, a people, or an alliance; when they are defeated or annihilated (or you are), the war is over.
We can never know with certainty if the underlying intention of the creators of these two abominable Wars--on Terror and on Drugs, now ten and forty years after their inception--was actually to destroy the average American's trust in government, together with their belief in the Constitution. We can be certain of the primary effect: a continual erosion of our rights under the Constitution, and a nearly continual playing of the fear card to keep the masses in line. The purpose that they are being used for today, however, seems clear: America is becoming more like the police state one found in the Stalin's Soviet Union or Hitler's Germany, and less like the nation whose ideals were expressed by Jefferson and Madison.
No matter the original intentions of their creators, the War on Terror--like the War on Drugs before it--has rapidly devolved into a war against our rights under the U.S. Constitution. From No-Knock warrants to the indefinite detention of non-citizens by the military without trial (because of the suspicion they are associated with some foreign terrorist group) to the extra-judicial murder of American citizens overseas for belonging to an organization determined by the government to be a group of terrorists. Fifty years ago these were actions that most Americans would have attributed only to the Communist bloc, and perhaps a small number of dictatorships like Franco's Spain, never to the United States of America.
The militarization of law enforcement is another aspect of this same problem. Increasingly police are dealing with problems in their communities by using military style raids and tactics, and using the fear generated by these tactics to oppress those who actively oppose the status quo. The idea of making police a part of and answerable to the community--which began with such promise in the late 1960's and early 70's--has disappeared, and police-community relations have devolved into an adversarial one in most major American cities. The reactions of police to the Occupy Movement demonstrate how far Police Departments have strayed from the ideal of police-community relations in a positive sense forty years ago. It has been replaced by a system of "cooperation" and surveillance that owes more to the East German Stasi than any democratic principles.
A corporation's priorities when they take over the incarceration of prisoners is the third part. When private corporations are brought in to hold prisoners--corporations whose primary interest is to keep the cost of incarcerating human beings down and shareholder's profits up--the first thing that falls by the wayside are the programs to rehabilitate prisoners: education, mental health services, and qualified "corrections officers." The private corporations hire individuals whose qualifications too often times are nothing other than being more brutal than the prisoners they guard.
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