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Two big reasons. First, maybe they want to get the person off the streets for some reason. Maybe they’re violent. But getting individual charges to stick can be difficult, so they just throw everything they can at the person to hopefully get them for something.
Second, it’s something they can use in plea bargaining. To use the above violent offender example, maybe someone is charged with battery and weed possession. The battery charge is hard to prove, but the weed possession is ironclad. The plea deal removes the (easy to prove) weed charge, but keeps the (hard to prove) battery charge. Now they didn’t need to bother with actually proving it, because the plea has them admitting to it. Without that weed charge, their only bargaining chip would be to reduce the violent charge to something lesser.
Whether or not it’s okay is really up to individual interpretation. But those are at least the two big arguments for why it became common.