Oklahoma Law

LA report was released yesterday saying 1\4 of the children in Oklahoma are living in poverty, with a percentage of those having parents who do not have steady employment.
Oklahoma has one of the highest incarceration rates of males in the US and is #1 in the amount of women it sends to prison.
Our welfare and family services are nearing a crisis-there are not enough foster homes for the children who have been removed from homes. The number of children had gone up every year.
Oklahoma prisons are overflowing with people serving outrageously long sentences for non violent drug crimes. Due to the state's outdated sentencing guidelines and mandatory sentencing, a non violent drug offender will do more prison time than someone convicted of assault, robbery, rape or manslaughter. These offenders are often inmates that get "early release"  due to overcrowding. Most sentences for drug offenders include stipulations that they not be considered for early release.
The budget for the state run prisons is into the BILLIONS of dollars. 3 times the budget for education.
I"m not  politician and I don't have a college degree but even I can see the issue here.  When you throw people in prisons with no rehab programs no programs to help them learn a job skill, no programs to help them learn to function in society, no programs to help them find jobs when they are paroled. So they stay in the system and their children stay in the welfare system.
The reason there aren't enough foster homes are the majority of the kids are older, who have been shuffled from home to home, their parents are addicts who can't get out of the vicious circle and they've seen the law raid their house and take their parents to jail. They act out and rebel against authority because regardless of how crappy a kids parents are, they are still their mom and dad and they love them. They are separated from their siblings. How about some of that prison budget go for programs to help the addicts get unaddicted and programs to help these kids deal with what they are going through.
It all comes down to breaking that circle. Often parents who are addicted and in and out of jail have children that are the same way. How about coming up with a plan to help them break that circle? DHS is not the answer, its as broken as our education. System. Kids deserve an education, they deserve to have food to eat, they deserve to live in a safe home with their parents and siblings. People living below the poverty line in Oklahoma deserve the opportunity to get above it and to better themselves and no non violent drug offender should be sentenced to life in prison without parole.
There's starting to be an alarming trend in Oklahoma of law enforcement at the local level are doing whatever they want including breaking the law for a drug conviction. If racial profiling wasn't bad enough, it seems that going after lower income folks that they believe to be ignorant of the law and their rights are getting court appointed attorneys who don't care if the arrest was pursuant to the law. They talk them in to taking a deal and going to prison. So the prisons are filling up with people who were unfortunate to be poor and not have a working knowledge of the law. Surely I can't be the only one who finds it more than a little repulsive that law enforcement is getting away with breaking the law to send people to jail.
It should be obvious to our conservative state government that their way is not working and it needs to be changed. Seriously, who in the hell can think that its a good thing that the state prison budget is larger than their education budget!!
Its time for people to start making some noise for change.