In an interview with the Des Moines Register on Dec. 23, Democratic presidential contender Pete Buttigieg, the may of South Bend, Ind., said that he does not support placing people in jail if they are caught in possession of any illegal drug, including cocaine, ecstasy, or even methamphetamine.
After Buttigieg explained his views on drug possession and prison, an editor asked him, "Is that across the board? So, if it's meth or coke or ecstasy, any drug if it's possession incarceration isn't --."
"That's right," said Buttigieg, who earned degrees from Harvard University and Oxford University.
In his earlier remarks on the issue, as transcribed by Breitbart News, Buttigieg said, “Incarceration should not even be a response to drug possession. What I have seen is that while there continues to be all kinds of harms associated with drug possession and use, it's also the case that we have created -- in an effort to deal with a public health problem -- we have created an even bigger problem, a justice problem, and it’s own form of a health problem, if you think about the adverse aspects on a child."
"We have kids in South Bend who have grown up with the incarceration of a parent as one of their first experiences," said the candidate. "That makes them dramatically more likely to wind up themselves having an encounter with the criminal legal system."
"So I’ve always been skeptical of mass incarceration," he said. "But now I believe, more than ever, we need to take really significant steps like ending incarceration as a response to simple possession.”
Pete Buttigieg, 37, is openly gay and is "married" to Chasten Glezman, 30, a high school teacher. The two men met on the dating app Hinge.
Pete's father was Joseph Buttigieg (1947-2019), a tenured English professor at the University of Notre Dame (1980-2017). Although teaching at a Catholic university, Joseph Buttigieg spent much of his career translating and editing a three-volume edition of the Prison Notebooks, written by the Communist revolutionary Antonio Gramsci. Prof. Buttigieg also was a founder and president of the International Gramsci Society.
Antonio Gramsci was an Italian Communist committed to the overthrow of capitalism and Western, Christian civilization. Gramsci is largely known for promoting communism through culture, the academy, the media and the arts, a long-term and less violent means to attain revolutionary ends. Gramsci was a founding member of the Italian Communist Party. He was arrested by the Fascists in 1926 and died in prison 11 years later.
Prof. Buttigieg's only real book on literature was the 1987 A Portrait of the Artist in Different Perspective, an ineffectual and largely forgotten analysis of James Joyce and the New Criticism.