Prison • Prison Policy

Prison Nation or Rogue State???

April 23, 2008
by Celeste Fremon
11 Comments

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One more primary election down. Five thousand four hundred seventy eight to go. (Or at least that’s how it feels.)

In the meantime, a change of subject:

Adam Liptak he has written an excellent article in today’s New York Times that definitely should be required reading.


It’s about our out-of-control prison system. And it’s heartening to see that the so-called mainstream media has, of late, finally been taking an interest.

Here are some emblematic clips

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.)

[snip]
Far from serving as a model for the world, contemporary America is viewed with horror,” James Q. 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 H. 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.

There’s lots more. So…..READ ON.

11 Comments

  • Those statistics are so typical of what liberals pull out and are so meaningless.

    If other countries prosecuted government workers who took bribes, their prison rates would soar. Mexican prisonsers would number more than the rest of the population. We do what’s best for us and other countries can ignore crimes–unless those crimes happen to be breaking politically correct speech codes, in which case the full strength of the law will come to bear.

    (Animal Story: The Pope Loves Cats)

  • R.P.: An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

    I agree, except that the police and other law enforcement do not prevent crimes but investigate them and attempt to bring the criminals to justice.

    However, we could start profiling young Muslim males at airports and monitoring calls from known foreign terrorists to people inside our nation. We could start asking groups of black youths what they are doing in a “white neighborhood.” We could stop all the Mexicans and check to see if they are here legally.

    But, sometimes, there are roadblocks to crime prevention.

  • 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.)

    ********************

    And how many are buried in secret graves, people may commit less in China because the have a fear of prison, torture and the government. What a stupid ass comment above, comparing China to the U.S. It only proves that, if people are fearful of being tortured or killed by their government you have less criminals. I wonder if the author knows how many Chinese live in abject poverty or that China tortures its prisoners and has very quick executions for non capital crimes. (No three strikes law needed)

    I’ll bet there was less crime and prisoners in Afghanistan under the Taliban than in the U.S., no gangster rap, violent movies or any other western influence under the Taliban.

    Even Woody makes more sense than the N.Y. Times writer.


    http://tinyurl.com/7wkqw

  • We could start asking groups of black youths what they are doing in a “white neighborhood.” We could stop all the Mexicans and check to see if they are here legally.

    You know I used to defend you against people who called you a bigot. Not any more.

  • Randy, I’m not saying what I feel personally. I’m just explaining what is involved in “prevention”–a lot of objectionable steps. I only brought up that one thing because it was done for decades by police. If it got your attention, then good. Think about the problems of prevention. It’s not about me.

  • R.P., when prevention fails and someone is in my house, I’ll utilize he Second Amendment.

    I know the Fourth Amendment, but police have applied it broadly and still do. My kid was stopped by the police simply because he had a new car tag. When I griped to them, they said that many stolen cars have fake new car tags, and that’s why they checked. Bull, but they did it.

    However, I have no problem with profiling, such as assuming that a young Muslim male is a bigger flight security threat than an 80 year old grandmother. Liberals object to that.

    Don’t expect police to prevent crime if you also tie their hands.

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