It’s been making headlines everywhere. Everyone’s talking about it. Some states are actually doing it. As of January 1, 2014, marijuana is officially legal in the state of Colorado and the national media has made no secret of it. While this does not mean that the federal government has rescheduled cannabis in terms of the Controlled Substance Act, President Obama has made some comments on the subject of legalization in places like Washington and Colorado in an interview with the New Yorker.

“It’s important for it to go forward because it’s important for society not to have a situation in which a large portion of people have at one time or another broken the law and only a select few get punished.”

These are the words from the mouth of the President of the United States himself. And yet he hasn’t done anything to stop this phenomenon. To be fair, however, that’s not where the national discussion for marijuana is headed. While it seems as though everyone is using the rhetoric of innocents going to jail, the only thing they’re really interested in is money.

News outlets everywhere have been saying that Colorado’s experiment in legalizing Colorado is a success! This is solely based on the fact that there’s been a lot of revenue generated for the state, but why wouldn’t there be? Some of the nation’s first “pot shops” reported making a million dollars on their first day in business. The ‘marijuana industry’ is cited by many as being one of the fastest growing industries around! The drug war is being reported as “having failed” as if it were a matter of fact that the federal government has ‘lost’ the drug war.

But the numbers paint a much different picture. In fact, before Colorado legalized, President Obama’s opinion on marijuana legislation has been left relatively unstated. He’s dodged questions about the federal government undermining medical marijuana laws passed by states(namely, California) that have been around for more than a decade before Colorado legalized.

According to the Huffington Post’s Lucia Graves back in 2012, “the administration has unleashed an interagency cannabis crackdown that goes beyond anything seen under the Bush administration, with more than 100 raids, primarily on California pot dispensaries, many of them operating in full compliance with state laws. Since October 2009, the Justice Department has conducted more than 170 aggressive SWAT-style raids in 9 medical marijuana states, resulting in at least 61 federal indictments, according to data compiled by Americans for Safe Access, an advocacy group.”

It seems as though everyone is interested in marijuana legalization. That is a fact that is not contestable. The ethical argument that millions of innocents go to jail every year has been spewed around by just about everyone, from former police officers to President Obama. However, when the success of the first recreational marijuana programs comes into question, no one talks about how urban communities are flourishing. Nobody is reporting on the improvement of the lives of the innocent black and Latino youths who are picked up off the street and given life-long sentences that start from a five-gram drug charge and end with a lifetime of unemployment and discrimination.

I think the best person to describe what the prison system is like for the (mostly) innocent youths is Bernard Kerik. The former New York City Police Commissioner spent four years in federal prison for “tax fraud” and “lying to the White House”, which all stemmed from his employment of an illegal immigrant. He’s got a much more “all-encompassing” view on the prison system than any politician, having been on both sides of the law. He says that the prison system is disastrous for the economy as well as the lives of the nation’s youth, and I’m inclined to agree. The United States prison population has gone from about 300,000 in 1970 to 2,500,000 in 2006, and the increase in numbers spikes directly after Nixon declared that there even was a war on drugs.

Kerik says that the overall criminal justice system needs a long-term overhaul. He speaks of the public’s ignorance on the subject. “Out of sight, out of mind,” is the attitude that most people take on prison reform. He speaks of 19 and 20 year old boys who go to prison for up to 30 years in the federal system for drug charges they would have merely gotten a year of probation for in the state system.

Of course, the plight and suffering of innocents isn’t something that the public likes to hear or read about. In my opinion, the reason that the public eye is on the ‘budding legal marijuana industry’ instead of the unjust penalties faced by minority youths over the last 40 years is that people just don’t want to hear about it. A new industry that promises millions is much more interesting to the capitalist than restoring some semblance of a life for a wrongfully imprisoned kid from the South Bronx. Why the hell should you care if someone else gets out of prison? What difference does it make if an entire generation of children gets to grow up without the fear of being picked up off the street or having to grow up without a parent?

To the overlying majority of news outlets, it doesn’t make a difference. That’s all on you. So the next time someone brings up marijuana legalization, maybe you ought to bring up the prison industrial complex instead. That’s something that requires much more urgent attention than getting stoned and listening to Bob Marley while eating Doritos.

Listen to Bernard Kerik’s interview on The Brian Lehrer Show.