http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/02/28/prison.population.ap/index.html
This is pretty crazy stuff. Some highlights:
-The U.S. leads the world in people incarcerated per capital (over 1%), ahead of runners up, the notoriously authoritarian ex-Soviet Bloc.
-We have a higher absolute number of people in prison than China.
-Astronomical recent increases in the imprisoned population do not reflect proportional (or even remotely close to proportional) increases in crime.
-For men between 20-34, 1 in 30 are in prison; for black men of that age group, the figure is 1 in 9.
I would also be interested to see what percentage of black men have ever been prison, as opposed to the percentage that is in prison right now. I'm sure the answer would be frightening.
Anyway, what the hell is wrong with us? I have no radical objection to imprisonment in serious cases (e.g., rape, muder, battery, kidnapping), but it strikes me as impossible to deny that we imprison far too many people for relatively minor crimes. I think we should use restitution and community-service based punishment for all property crimes, except the most serious (e.g., large-scale fraud, serious white collar crime, armed robbery, arson). Other than that, the only way you should end up in prison is if you really physically hurt somebody.
Obviously, we should also seriously tackle the problem of spatially concentrated urban minority poverty. Previous posts should shed some light on how I would go about doing that.
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Pretty disgusting. 1 in 9 black men between the ages of 20-34 is in prison. I wonder how many black men of that age group were enslaved in 1860, versus how many lived as free blacks in the North.
ReplyDeleteWhile their per capita incarcerations may be lower, I don't think the developed democracies often serving as role models to progressive Americans (and favorite examples evoked in Michael Moore films) have much of an example to set in terms of racial disparity.
It's clear that there are more French-born Arabs and North Africans languishing in French prisons than there are white Frenchmen.
The French government as a matter of egalitarian policy does not publicize demographic data for its populations (civilian or prison), so I can't quote any official figures, but I've read as high as 70% of prison inmates are immigrants or of immigrant descent.
And it wouldn't surprise me to learn that there are just as many Turks in German prisons as in Turkish prisons.
True enough, there is plenty of blame to go around. Western Europe is very far from a perfect role model. But the U.S. leads the pack in bad policy and bad results.
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