US notches world's highest incarceration rate

[Nambe]

The Christian Science Monitor

More than 5.6 million Americans are in prison or have served time there, according to a new report by the Justice Department released Sunday. That's 1 in 37 adults living in the United States, the highest incarceration level in the world.

It's the first time the US government has released estimates of the extent of imprisonment, and the report's statistics have broad implications for everything from state fiscal crises to how other nations view the American experience.

If current trends continue, it means that a black male in the United States would have about a 1 in 3 chance of going to prison during his lifetime. For a Hispanic male, it's 1 in 6; for a white male, 1 in 17. -

Banish bush From Texas Too

[patdem]

1. If the religious reight or the republicans take this country by crook

I will move to mexico,...honduras....haiti....any where to get away from this horrible racist homophobe religionist nation....give me voo doo any day! Oh, by the way I am white!!!

[Mari333]

2. Its also called creating cheap labour for PRIVAT IZED Prisons

they can make inmates work for less then minimum wage....what a scam.

[TahitiNut]

8. Cheap labor outside prisons, too.

An ex-convict has far less "earning power" -- it's not a good line on a resume.

[psychopomp]

3. Worse than China, Cuba, Syria, North Korea...

and any other "bogeyman" state that is trotted out for comparison by our media managers to help us understand that we are "hated for our freedoms."

Either Americans just love to do time or the U.S.A. is in very dire straits in 2003.

[SodoffBush]

4. Some states spend more money on prisons than they do colleges

Interesting that it has taken a fiscal crisis for states to be forced to take a common-sense approach to drugs. States can no longer pay for prison terms, so they must rely on drug treatment instead.

"Tough on crime" is now on the "out" list; states can't afford it.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2003-08-10-crime-usat_x.htm

States are granting early release to non-violent prisoners, cutting sentences, sending drug offenders to treatment centers and revising tough-on-crime laws in reverse of a 20-year trend.

State lawmakers haven't gone soft on crime. They're just short of cash to pay for some of the anti-crime and anti-drug laws approved in the 1980s and 1990s.

<snip>

Connecticut's prison population has grown from 4,800 in 1982 to 19,500 in 2003. "We now spend more on our prisons than our colleges," Lawler says.

The same is true elsewhere. A record 1.2 million inmates were housed in state prisons in 2002.

[Julien Sorel]

5. We're #1 again! Woohoo!

Number 1 in handgun homicides, by a country mile, and Number 1 in percentage of populace behind bars. Take that, you pansy-assed, soft-on-crime Europeans! This is how it's done in the U.S. of A.!!!!!!

[tsipple]

6. We Should Release the Following...

...and save taxpayers lots of money, assuming these individuals are non-violent: drug users, drug sellers, and sex workers. Why we pay to have any of these people in jail is beyond me.

[bluestateguy]

7. There we go!

America has moved into first place in something for the first time in the Bush Administration. Now the question is, why don't we have the safest streets in the world?

[TahitiNut]

9. Why?

Prison is "graduate school" for criminality. An ex-convict has very poor job prospects, is "visited" by police quite often, and probably has about a 1 in 20 chance of being innocent of the crime for which (s)he was convicted. After that, who'd really be as motivated to "go straight"? :shrug:

Effective social programs are seven times more cost-effective, unless the "effect" one is seeking includes a bloated prison industry, more police, and 3.7 million low-paid workers.

[judgegina]

10. Recently, my conservative local newspaper's...

question of the week was: Should a constitutional amendment be passed to ban flag burning?

My reply: Do we really need another reason to put a person in jail in this country? The United States has a larger percentage of its population locked up than any other country in the world. The Land of the Free?

[Julien Sorel]

11. The rest of the world envies us for our freedoms!

[Gretchen]

12. decriminalize drugs

We really need to re-evalute how our county looks at the so-called "drug war" and how drug related crimes are handled. I think the number of people in prison would be greatly reduced if we were to create an alternate way of dealing with the many people convicted of drug reated crimes. Our current sytstem wrecks lives and overburens the prison system.

[cprise]

13. kick!

This is what the 'endless war' paradigm has gotten us.