Land of the freeFollow

I'm sure the info is out there but I'm too lazy to look -- still, I'd be interested in how many people per capita are incarcerated for specific crimes (drugs, theft, violent crimes, etc) in the US vs other nations.

Law is such a stark failure in the United States.


We'll happily throw some dumb nigger in prison for 25 years for stealing a $30,000 car, but White CEO's that rob hundreds if not thousands of people out of their pensions, investments, and other interests for millions of dollars go untouched.

Or huge companies have a blithe disregard for Federal safty standards, and cut corners to reduce costs that injure, maim, and kill workers goes unscratched.

Both conservatives and liberals are guilty of completely ignoring the vast injustices in law.

These companies act like they are above the law, because in a lot of ways, they are. This isn't Columbia, you shouldn't be able to buy your way out of trouble when you do bad. But, these things happen consistantly.



Edited, Feb 28th 2008 3:53pm by Rimesume

I'd weigh in and say part of the problem are mandatory minimum and three strikes laws, which many judges and people in the legal system hate because they take away a judges right to have any discretion in a case.

And it's not surprising that the US is the leader. The only government funded institutions that the right is interested in funding are prisons and the military.

While I agree that the rate of imprisonment in the US is too high, I've got to question the reason the study chose specifically to compare the costs of said imprisonment to that spent on "higher education". Aside from a direct tie-in to a bit of election year rhetoric I've heard bandied about a few times over the last 6 months, I'm not sure I see the relevance.

Despite the suggestion in the report, a dollar spent on one isn't a dollar taken from the other. I'm not aware of any shortage of funding for higher education, nor any evidence that spending more on education would magically turn those currently in jail or prison into hard working productive citizens.

A more accurate assessment would be how much is spent on k-12 education, drop out rates, teen-pregnancy rates, etc, since those have much much more to do with the rise in the sort of crimes that have presumably caused the biggest growth in the inmate population over the last couple decades. Perhaps with an analysis of the impact of private/charter/magnet/home schooling on those things.

You know. If we're going to arbitrarily imply that one thing has anything to do with the other...

Wow, very interesting article.

Part of the problem, I think, is that drug offenders especially are thrown in jail instead of being enrolled in a rehabilitative program to overcome addiction. I'm not sure about other states, but here in FL we do have a year-long "drug court" program that my agency helps oversee in my city, that at least allows drug offenders the chance to not go to prison and instead participate in a rehabilitative program that has daily drug testing. Participants run the risk of being incarcerated after one dirty screening, however.

Additionally, about half of prison inmates have a mental health issue, and only about a third (depending on whether it's local, state or federal prison) will receive treatment while incarcerated. The link below is a pretty good breakdown of the prevalence of mental health diagnoses in inmates.
Source

USA 99% free. Thats not too shabby IMHO. We could let half the prisoners go and return back to the high crime of the past, or just accept the fact that at least 1 out of 100 people are criminals and deserve to be behind bars. From personal experience

Or we could imprison people for being ******* ignorant morons, but I imagine you wouldn't enjoy that sort of a society quite as much.

It'd be great for me, though.

I think the main problem is that the US criminal justice system is almost exclusively punitive, based on deterrent. You don't seem to have much restorative justice at all. And yet it's clear that restorative justice systems, especially for minor offenses and young offenders, is much more productive in the long-term than punitive justice systems. It creates a sense of cimmunity, it actually produces results, it gives offenders a chance to understand what they've done wrong and how to make it right, and it creates closure for the victim. It's also "free" public work.

Putting drug users in jail is the single most stupid thing you can do in a justice system. These guys are not criminal, they have mental health problem. It's not criminal justice, but public health. Not only that, but most of these guys enter prisons as ill people and come out of it with a Masters Degree in Criminology.

Also, I'm not convinced electing judges is the best thing to do. They tend to be driven by political pressures, as opposed to following their own sense of justice. They also tend to be populist. And apply "victim's justice", which is almost always way out of proportion with what is needed, and is often vindictive.