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Our political leaders are too cowardly to touch these problems. They all want to puff out their chests and be tougher on crime than the others. If you do anything to fix the problem, you are "soft on crime."
If I recall correctly, federal LSD sentencing has also been very screwy for over a decade now. When they re-wrote the sentencing guidelines for LSD a while ago, they did it sloppily. LSD is usually applied in liquid form to some sort of carrier that is placed on the tongue. Usually paper, but sometimes a sugar cube. The law was written so the weight of the carrier material was counted as part of the drug quantity. So if you have a drop of LSD soaked into a sugar cube, it weighs as much as 1000 drops of pure LSD would. You get sentenced as a dealer even if you only have one dose of LSD. I've read several stories of unlucky kids caught with one hit of LSD going to jail for the rest of their lives. The lawmakers know about this problem, but nobody is going to fix it, because they will be marked as soft on crime.
Same thing with rape in prison. It's a system-wide problem that amounts to cruel and unusual punishment, but nobody cares. Many people think it's actually funny.
Don't expect a Republican controlled congress to do anything about any of these problems. They won't lift a finger to help the downtrodden.
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