According to a 2005 report of the International Centre for Prison Studies in London, the United States—with five percent of the world’s population—houses 25 percent of the world’s inmates.
Do we just make too many laws, or are we really bad people? I know that our laws indicate our reverence for property rights, particularly money, and so, I thought, being one of the wealthiest countries on earth, perhaps the report is simply confirmation of that. I may not have been far off, but that's not all.
One third of inmates in state prisons are violent criminals, convicted of homicide, rape, or robbery. But the other two thirds consist mainly of property and drug offenders.[...]
How did it come to this? One argument is that the massive increase in incarceration reflects the success of a rational public policy: faced with a compelling social problem, we responded by imprisoning people and succeeded in lowering crime rates. This argument is not entirely misguided.
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A more convincing argument is that imprisonment rates have continued to rise while crime rates have fallen because we have become progressively more punitive: not because crime has continued to explode (it hasn’t), not because we made a smart policy choice, but because we have made a collective decision to increase the rate of punishment.
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Between 1980 and 2001, there was no real change in the chances of being arrested in response to a complaint: the rate was just under 50 percent. But the likelihood that an arrest would result in imprisonment more than doubled, from 13 to 28 percent.
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Despite a sharp national decline in crime, American criminal justice has become crueler and less caring than it has been at any other time in our modern history. Why?
These days we are sooooo into punishment, just like our Old Testament God. My guess is the need to punish has risen in concert with the rise of the Religious Right. It's just a guess. My other guess is that the current fear-mongering, shock and awe, torture-minded example our top government officials show us gives a sheen of legitimacy to hatred and vindictiveness. Just another guess.
After reading a few articles on the criminal laws here in Texas, I wonder if maybe I should actually read what they are. (I've already been warned not to try to buy sex toys, although even if I wanted some, I wouldn't know what back alley to look in to find a pusher.)
"A couple of weeks ago, the local paper printed names of El Pasoans with outstanding arrest warrants. 78,000 El Pasoans made the paper! When we compared Austin, same story: 11% of Austin has outstanding arrest warrants. How did that happen?"
In 2003, on the House floor, Rep. Diane Delisi told Texans that the “Driver Responsibility” bill was needed "to improve driver’s behavior." Everyone in Austin knew that the real story was money. After 9/11, Texans quit buying. Sales tax revenues dropped so much that Texas now had a $10 billion budget deficit. Rather than raise taxes, Republicans cut taxes on the wealthiest Texans, cut programs like CHIP, then shifted fees, tuition and tickets to low and middle income Texans.[...]
Theoretically, after three tickets, a driver can owe $3,000 and more, depending on the offense.
And if you can’t pay, you go to jail.
Working on the chain gang makes it awfully hard to pay for a ticket.
Grits for Breakfast suggests that Texas just plain has too many activities listed as felonies.
[T]he Board of Pardons and Parole has identified 2,324 separate acts which the state Legislature has declared felonies!(When God sat down to author His list of forbidden acts, readers may recall, he could only come up with ten.)
....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.
"Do we just make too many laws, or are we really bad people?"
ReplyDeleteAs with war, bad health care, and a host of other problems in this country, the main cause is this: There's money to be made from it.
Read The Perpetual Prisoner Machine: How America Profits from Crime for a description of the various ways that Repugs are making fortunes from the "war on drugs" and other techniques used to keep our prison population growing.
Just as important for the real criminals (the Repugs), much of the prison population is put to work for practically nothing, joining illegal immigrants as a potent tool to keep American labor from ever regaining serious political or economic power. Conceptual Guerrila's term "cheap labor conservatives" describes the motives perfectly.
Lastly, of course, it is a potent means of social control of people of color. While Noelle Bush and Rush Limbaugh go to rehab for six weeks, Tyrone Jackson goes to Attica for eight years for possession. The number of African Americans currently incarcerated or on probation is approximately the same as the number who were enslaved in 1850.
Michael Moore's least-famous movie, THe Big One, had a segment on prison labor.
add to the above the privatization of penal institutes.
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