Tens of Thousands of People Every Year Sent to Jail Based on Results from Ridiculously Flawed Roadside Drug Test

“Why are police departments and prosecutors still using them?”

The article doesn’t go anywhere near the reason, which is that large Wall Street banks profit from the private gulag system in America:

The prison industry as a whole took in over $5 billion in revenue in 2011.
According to journalist Matt Taibbi, Wall Street banks took notice of this influx of cash, and are now some of the prison industry’s biggest investors. Wells Fargo has around 100 million invested in GEO Group and 6 million in CCA. Other major investors include Bank of America, Fidelity Investments, General Electric and The Vanguard Group. CCA’s share price went from a dollar in 2000 to $34.34 in 2013. Sociologist John L. Campbell and activist and journalist Chris Hedges respectively assert that prisons in the United States have become a “lucrative” and “hugely profitable” business.
…
Most privately run facilities are located in the southern and western portions of the United States and include both state and federal offenders. For example, Pecos, Texas is the site of the largest private prison in the world, the Reeves County Detention Complex, operated by the GEO Group. It has a capacity of 3,763 prisoners in its three sub-complexes.

Texas. Sprawling private prions. Flawed $2 roadside drug test kits.
What could possibly go wrong?
The private prison scam is one of the most horrific aspects of the U.S.—and one which people probably don’t think much about until they find themselves inside its belly. In the piece below, I think we’re meant to take away a glimmer of hope from the fact that some minuscule number of bogus drug convictions are being overturned, but I refuse to see it that way. In the end, countless lives have been shattered over nothing, and the practice continues.
This is a long article but I encourage you to read it all. If you get swept into the maw of the prison system monster because of a roadside drug test, the information in this article could, quite literally, prevent your life from being ruined (assuming you survive being arrested).

Via: ProPublica:
All of the 212 N.C.S. defendants struck plea bargains, and nearly all of them, 93 percent, received a jail or prison sentence. Defendants with no previous convictions have a legal right in Texas to probation on drug-possession charges, even if they’re convicted at trial. But remarkably, 78 percent of defendants entitled to probation agreed to deals that included incarceration. Perhaps most striking: A majority of those defendants, 58 percent, pleaded guilty at the first opportunity, during their arraignment; the median time between arrest and plea was four days. In contrast, the median for defendants in which the field test indicated the wrong drug or that the weight was inaccurate — that is, the defendants who actually did possess drugs — was 22 days. Not only do the innocent tend to plead guilty in these cases, but they often do so more quickly.