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U.s. Prison Population Dwarfs That Of Other Nations
| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» databoy replied on Sun Apr 24, 2011 @ 4:25pm |
 Coolness: 106130 | By Adam Liptak
Published: Wednesday, April 23, 2008 The United States has less than 5 percent of the world's population. But it has almost a quarter of the world's prisoners. Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations. Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say they are mystified and appalled by the number and length of American prison sentences. The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation, according to data maintained by the International Center for Prison Studies at King's College London. China, which is four times more populous than the United States, is a distant second, with 1.6 million people in prison. (That number excludes hundreds of thousands of people held in administrative detention, most of them in China's extrajudicial system of re-education through labor, which often singles out political activists who have not committed crimes.) San Marino, with a population of about 30,000, is at the end of the long list of 218 countries compiled by the center. It has a single prisoner. The United States comes in first, too, on a more meaningful list from the prison studies center, the one ranked in order of the incarceration rates. It has 751 people in prison or jail for every 100,000 in population. (If you count only adults, one in 100 Americans is locked up.) The only other major industrialized nation that even comes close is Russia, with 627 prisoners for every 100,000 people. The others have much lower rates. England's rate is 151; Germany's is 88; and Japan's is 63. The median among all nations is about 125, roughly a sixth of the American rate. There is little question that the high incarceration rate here has helped drive down crime, though there is debate about how much. Criminologists and legal experts here and abroad point to a tangle of factors to explain America's extraordinary incarceration rate: higher levels of violent crime, harsher sentencing laws, a legacy of racial turmoil, a special fervor in combating illegal drugs, the American temperament, and the lack of a social safety net. Even democracy plays a role, as judges — many of whom are elected, another American anomaly — yield to populist demands for tough justice. Whatever the reason, the gap between American justice and that of the rest of the world is enormous and growing. It used to be that Europeans came to the United States to study its prison systems. They came away impressed. "In no country is criminal justice administered with more mildness than in the United States," Alexis de Tocqueville, who toured American penitentiaries in 1831, wrote in "Democracy in America." No more. "Far from serving as a model for the world, contemporary America is viewed with horror," James Whitman, a specialist in comparative law at Yale, wrote last year in Social Research. "Certainly there are no European governments sending delegations to learn from us about how to manage prisons." Prison sentences here have become "vastly harsher than in any other country to which the United States would ordinarily be compared," Michael Tonry, a leading authority on crime policy, wrote in "The Handbook of Crime and Punishment." Indeed, said Vivien Stern, a research fellow at the prison studies center in London, the American incarceration rate has made the United States "a rogue state, a country that has made a decision not to follow what is a normal Western approach." The spike in American incarceration rates is quite recent. From 1925 to 1975, the rate remained stable, around 110 people in prison per 100,000 people. It shot up with the movement to get tough on crime in the late 1970s. (These numbers exclude people held in jails, as comprehensive information on prisoners held in state and local jails was not collected until relatively recently.) The nation's relatively high violent crime rate, partly driven by the much easier availability of guns here, helps explain the number of people in American prisons. [ www.nytimes.com ] |
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| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» Blisss replied on Sun Apr 24, 2011 @ 5:08pm |
 Coolness: 129735 | Most prisons in the states are run like corporations, they trade stock on the market
Its too their benefit to see MORE people imprisonned Besides its provides a great pool of workers for what is essentially slave labor |
| I'm feeling sunshine right now.. | |
| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» recoil replied on Sun Apr 24, 2011 @ 6:39pm |
 Coolness: 86520 | this doesn't surprise me in the least. the American government is a fascist regime. just look at their history. It was founded on the back of the Afican slave trade and slave labour, on land stolen and cheated from the First Nations peoples.
it's fruit of the poison tree. The same tribes that helped the Pilgrims through their first winter in 1620 were tricked out of their land onto tiny reserves, and the ones who resisted were ruthlessly slaughtered, or wiped out with disease and alcohol. When the settlers first moved west in the 1840s there was so many Buffalo it would take days for a herd to pass. by 1900 they were almost extinct. Estimates of the pre-European herd size vary from 30,000,000 to
70,000,000 animals and they ranged over most of North America. Unregulated killing of bison led to the many millions of animals being reduced to no more than 1,500 individuals in the mid to late 1800s. Since the Plains tribes depended on the Buffalo to live, the government decided to shoot as many Buffalo as possible, skin them and leave the carcasses to rot.. just to starve the Plains tribes out of existence. 
a scorched earth policy I guess, one that they repeated with their use of the carcinogenic Agent Orange defoliant on the rainforests of South East Asia and still today, on many of their reservations people are living in basically like Third World conditions.. as I'm sure they are in Canada too.. any attempt by MLK, the Black Panthers or First Nations groups to unify their communities and fight for civil rights was sabotaged and crushed by the FBI's COINTELPRO program. The American government has admitted this FBI program existed. the leaders of the resistance were assassinated, shot dead in early morning raids, or jailed for life on trumped up charges. Fascism once again. former government officials have also admitted that the CIA was indeed shipping South American cocaine and pushing it in South Central LA in the 1980s. The result was the crack cocaine epidemic and the explosion of the Crips and Bloods nation-wide. President Reagan knew this was going on, and gave them the "green light". The deal was the DEA would look the other way, while the CIA did what it had to do to raise funds for their secret war in Central America. To them, the ends justified the means. So while Nancy Reagan was doing commercials for "The War on Drugs". the real war was against Socialist governments in Central America, and they were financing it with plane loads of cocaine, which was converted into cheap smokable crack and unleashed on the impoverished residents of South Central LA by local street gangs. It's not conspiracy theory. It's fact. and when these minorities whom they forced to live in such abject misery get caught for their crimes, just warehouse them in jails. |
| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» Blisss replied on Sun Apr 24, 2011 @ 10:30pm |
| Coolness: 129735 | Nowadays I don't even think its a question of being a minority, there's plenty of white people getting sent to jails.
Its all about economics. The more prisoners they have, the more money they make. They can also make the prisoner work for a few cents an hour. It should also be noted though that slavery was never unique to the US. Back in the day Africans enslaving other Africans was quite common as well. In fact most of the slaves that were sold to the Europeans were provided by African chiefs in the first place in the form of prisoners. What happens now in the US is they've created a million laws which you're bound to end up breaking one of, the police catch you and turn you over to a private corporation who basically makes more money by keeping you in there then outside. |
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| Good [+2]Toggle ReplyLink» basdini replied on Sun Apr 24, 2011 @ 10:56pm |
 Coolness: 145215 | just get rid of the stupid drug laws, legalize every narcotic, sell it and tax it, then you would have money, get rid of the prisoner problem and reduce crime.
We just have to admit that the war drugs is over, it was a faliure, it was a faliure because people just like to get high. it's funny, we call drugs 'controled substances' because they are against the law but it's like we have any control over them, let's bring some control back by bring the market back out into the open instead of hidden in back alleys etc... |
| I'm feeling surly right now.. | |
| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» Psykotropik replied on Sun Apr 24, 2011 @ 11:26pm |
 Coolness: 37910 | Originally Posted By BASDINI
just get rid of the stupid drug laws, legalize every narcotic, sell it and tax it, then you would have money, get rid of the prisoner problem and reduce crime. We just have to admit that the war drugs is over, it was a faliure, it was a faliure because people just like to get high. it's funny, we call drugs 'controled substances' because they are against the law but it's like we have any control over them, let's bring some control back by bring the market back out into the open instead of hidden in back alleys etc... QFT. Drug prohibition is not good for society, from a rights- or health-based point of view. |
| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» recoil replied on Mon Apr 25, 2011 @ 12:08am |
| Coolness: 86520 | Originally Posted By BASDINI
just get rid of the stupid drug laws, legalize every narcotic, sell it and tax it, then you would have money, get rid of the prisoner problem and reduce crime. We just have to admit that the war drugs is over, it was a faliure, it was a faliure because people just like to get high. it's funny, we call drugs 'controled substances' because they are against the law but it's like we have any control over them, let's bring some control back by bring the market back out into the open instead of hidden in back alleys etc... well not only was the War on Drugs a failure, it was utter hypocrisy. how can there be a war on cocaine trafficking? the Reagan adminstration was willfully blind to the CIA flying it into the country. there was no war on drugs. more like a strategic alliance with right-wing military Narco-traffickers. shipping plane-loads of cocaine into the US was how their covert operations had to be financed. and the government recognized this as a justifiable means to an end. White House records show that shortly before Blandon's meeting with Bermudez, President Reagan had given the CIA the green light to begin covert paramilitary operations against the Sandinista government. But Reagan's secret Dec. 1, 1981, order permitted the spy agency to spend only $19.9 million on the project, an amount CIA officials acknowledged was not nearly enough to field a credible fighting force.
After meeting with Bermudez, Blandon testified, he and Meneses "started raising money for the contra revolution." While Blandon says Bermudez didn't know cocaine would be the fund-raising device they used, the presence of the mysterious Mr. Meneses strongly suggests otherwise. Norwin Meneses, known in Nicaraguan newspapers as "Rey de la Droga" (King of Drugs), was then under active investigation by the DEA and the FBI for smuggling cocaine into the United States, records show. And Bermudez was very familiar with the influential Meneses family. He had served under two Meneses brothers, Fermin and Edmundo, who were generals in Somoza's army. Despite a stack of law-enforcement reports describing him as a major drug trafficker, Norwin Meneses was welcomed into the United States in July 1979 as a political refugee and given a visa and a work permit. He settled in the San Francisco Bay Area, and for the next six years supervised the importation of thousands of kilos of cocaine into California. this is a video of Gary Webb - the brilliant journalist who exposed the links between crack cocaine, the wars in Central America, and the CIA. he is now deceased, allegedly a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. The people who were mainly targeted by the "war on drugs" were poor minorities.. getting handed 20 year sentences for selling 200 bucks worth of crack.. as was thee case with former professional baseball player Willie Aikens -> [ counter.thestar.topscms.com ] so I agree that control should be taken and they should be legalized. but I'd imagine cartels would be willing to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes to cops and judges and politicians to stop them from ever doing that. in Mexico it's been estimated the cartels are making 40 billion dollars profit every year. n the mid 1990s, U.S. government statistics revealed at least six billion dollars a year was spent by the cartels in bribes and payoffs to officials in the Mexican government and military. 6 billion in bribes every year. that's a fuck of a lot of money. and that's just what they report in Mexico. who knows how much bribe money American and Canadian government and military officials were paid. not to mention people in the CIA have been operating international drug rings for heroin and cocaine in the Golden Triangle, Central & SOuth American, and now Afghanistan since at least the 1940s. Why would they let anyone upset that apple cart? it seems like at least part of the motive for invading and controlling Afghanistan was to ensure that opium production was restored. It was briefly outlawed by the Taliban, but since the American occupation, opium production has not only resumed, but actually increased. 
so you have soldiers going there naively believing that they are helping fight terror, never knowing that some of these Afghan warlords are partners in covert CIA drug rings. a partnership that goes back to the early 80s when the CIA began working with these guys to defeat the Soviet Union. so yes. legalizing drugs would be beneficial. but I just can't see how these cartels and their allies in the government and military would ever let that happen. there's too much money at stake |
| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» Blisss replied on Mon Apr 25, 2011 @ 3:23am |
| Coolness: 129735 | Originally Posted By BASDINI
just get rid of the stupid drug laws, legalize every narcotic, sell it and tax it, then you would have money, get rid of the prisoner problem and reduce crime. Actually I read somewhere that marijuana originally became illegal when the cotton industry became afraid that hemp would replace cotton as a textile because hemp is much more solid and durable. The cotton companies then pressured the US government to make it illegal. Interestingly enough, the main reason behind the massive crackdown on raves and ectasy in the UK in the 90s was not due to the nature of the events themselves but had more to do with the fact the major alcohol compagnies in the UK were alarmed with the fact the kids weren't boozing it out at their pubs but were instead popping an "e" at an illegal warehouse. Most of the anti-rave legislation in the UK was lobbied for in part by the alcohol companies themselves. Most of the reasons for these laws have more to do with economics then anything else. There's no reason alcohol should be legal while marijuana and ectasy are banned. |
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U.s. Prison Population Dwarfs That Of Other Nations
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