The land of the free.
 

Quote:

A new study of US prisons has found that numbers of people in jail are at an all-time high, with more than 1% of the adult population behind bars.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7270607.stm

En:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/wo...il-790007.html

Yep, sad isn't it?

http://www.time.com/time/nation/arti...719872,00.html

"Brazil" on my mind: sack the guy by airborne assault commando, question him to death, and send the bill for the operation, prison, interrogation and execution to his wife. :roll:

Going the same way in the UK I'm afraid too.

Mind you, comparisons to Iran and China are rather specious. There, instead of getting jailed for jaywalking, you get a bullet in the back of the head. It's one way of keeping the prison population down.

Time to build more prisons?

And properly fund the ones we have.

I don't know much about prisons, but paying even more to incarcerate an even larger percentage of our population probably isn't the way to solve this. Unless you happen to be in the prison biz of course.

PD

I'm not sure how else to solve the problem. I doubt that we're a more criminal society today than in the past, but, for better or worse, we treat criminals very differently now. Crimes that a century ago would receive a public punishment such as flogging or being pilloried/humiliated are now sentenced to jail time. Capital punishments were much more common and resolved in a matter months, not 10-20 years. In addition, things that a century ago would've been ignored are now felonies. If two people get into a fistfight, one of the two will probably end up in jail for assault, no matter what the instigation.

There's also the idea that criminal investigative services are getting better. Things like fingerprints, D.N.A., better communication between states and agencies, video cameras, etc. make it tougher to get away with a crime, especially for the small time crook.

Unless we start using corporal punishment again and just forgo prison sentences for some of the lighter crimes, I don't see any way to resist the growning prison population. Unless we just make anything less than a murder a misdeamenor.

If the Chinese are good enough to free trade with, they should be good enough to run prisons for us also. Give us something to transport back on those container ships.

Prisons have become a sort of industry rather than an arm of the law, once that happens it's quite hard to avoid self-perpetuation.

Isn't the late-20th century prison population rise largely due to the "war on drugs"? Mandatory sentencing and all that jazz.
Why else would the population rise when crime is falling. Oh right, an industry, got it.

Not to mention people living much longer and that there are far more of us than there were a century ago.

Murder a misdemeanor? I have a list; I'm all for it.

In prison:

USA 645 per 100,000
The Netherlands 85 per 100,000

http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs/r88.pdf

But yes, we can smoke pot without getting jailed.

(not that I do smoke) ;)

Realy! and you have lived a life of...... Well numness lol.