Guilty When Charged

Chronicles Magazine ^ | Wednesday, December 28, 2005 | Paul Craig Roberts

[TKDietz]

"For a variety of reasons, I think English jurisdictions handle both civil and criminal matters better than we do. But that's a discussion for another day."

Just FYI, the incarceration rate in the United Kingdom is 139 per 100,000, compared to our rate of 724 per 100,000. Theirs is still the highest incarceration rate in the European Union, but it is a heck of a lot lower than ours. Ours is a heck of a lot (several times) higher than it ever was prior to 1980.

[republican4ever]

TDK
... I'm probably going to sound ignorant and/or stupid here, but what happened in 1980 to change it?

[GeronL]

exactly, it does happen. But they are exceptions. I heard the government threatened to prosecute one of the Enron wives if the husband didn't plead guilty.... so that might be one of the times.

[TKDietz]

It appears to be both a response to increased drug use in the 1960's and 1970's and just maybe a general change in the way we look at things. I really can't give a great answer to that question because frankly I'm a little bewildered by the drastic change in our incarceration rates. Incarceration rates climbed in the 1970's and by 1980 a new record high was reached. The war on drugs kicked in a lot harder in the 1980's. The feds really started getting more and more involved. We hired an awful lot more police officers and they've had to make an awful lot more arrests to justify their existence. We've gotten a lot more aggressive in our police tactics and courts are increasingly allowing police conduct that at one time would have been considered unconstitutional. We have more undercover police and snitches than we ever had.

Even the Game and Fish guys are getting involved. They're out undercover at fishing spots and swimming holes and canoing streams everywhere looking for people breaking the law. I spoke with one of the federal equivalents to our Game and Fish boys the other day in court and he was bragging to me about how effective all this new undercover work is for them, about how it is getting them more arrests than ever. Before when they drove in in marked vehicles people would stop doing whatever it was they were doing that was illegal. Now people will even admit to undercover officers who chat with them dressed as civilians that they don't have fishing licenses, or they might offer to drink beer or smoke marijuana with them or something. They had three of the state guys in court a few weeks back to testify on a big littering case. Three officers where there prepared to testify that this man and his family were at at the river and that they ate a pizza and "purposely" left the pizza box on the car and drove off. The undercover officer called ahead to have the man pulled over by uniformed officers. The officers even had the smoking gun evidence, the pizza box, there to introduce into evidence. I was so disgusted by those jerk -offs that it was all I could do not to cuss them up one side and down the other. What the hell are they wasting my tax dollars on this crap for? Since when did the damned park rangers become the KGB? Those asswipes are out there befriending and spying on people having a good time not hurting anyone. Is this America? What the hell is going on with my country?

That little rant aside, I think a lot of it has to do with the war on drugs. Most of the felony cases our office gets are drug cases. We handle literally thousands of pounds worth of drug cases a year in our small county. Most of the weight comes from drug mule cases where people are paid to drive across the country with big loads of dope in their vehicles. They pretty much all go to prison for a long time, probably longer than the actual kingpin types who own all this dope, in the rare event one of the big guys is ever busted. The other cases are generally little possession cases, possession with intent to deliver, delivery, or manufacturing cases. The delivery cases for the most part involve only tiny amounts of drugs. The buys are almost always conducted by "Confidential Informants" (CI's) who for the most part are druggies who have been busted and threatened by the narcotics officers who tell them how they'll see to it that they spend a long time in prison where they'll get pimped around for packs of cigarettes, unless they go out and make three buys for them, or something like that. These guys will call anyone they know who they might be able to talk into getting them some drugs and then they'll go in with marked money wearing a wire to make the buy. Usually it's something like a half a gram of meth or something, a half a Sweet & Lo package worth. Often I don't think these guys are even real drug dealers. They sure as heck don't have any money. In many cases they're probably just druggies who thinking they are helping out a friend. A lot of these CI's have sold a lot of dope too. Just about all the regular users will get drugs for a friend as a favor and a lot will do it for profit too mostly just to pay for their stash. There aren't any dope stores. People who do dope have to help each other find drugs. They expect it from each other. That's how massive black markets like this work. But even though these people are for the most part little small time dealers selling enough to their druggie friends to get some free dope or even only as a favor, they get treated like kingpins in our system.

A guy I know tried one a few weeks ago where his client was charged with possessing a half a gram of meth with intent to deliver. A CI had allegedly made a buy from the guy, but the CI was not called in to testify. Instead prosecutors introduced forty dollars in buy money from which they had recorded the serial numbers. They had gone in with a warrant based on the info the CI gave them and found the man in possession of a half a gram of meth, and with the buy money and testimony about giving the CI money to buy dope they busted the guy for possession with intent to deliver. One of the jurors even noticed during deliberations that the serials number of the bills the cops claimed the CI gave to the defendant did not match up with the ones they introduced at trial. But the jury convicted the man anyway and gave him thirty years. He had a spotless record prior to this bust. He was a Vietnam vet in his fifties in poor health who quite possibly will not live long enough in prison to ever be paroled out. It may be that he is just a terrible awful guy who has done all sorts of worse crimes for which he was never caught and we will all be better off with him in prison for a long time, even though it will cost us an awful lot of money, but I don't think that is the case with all of these guys. A lot of these guys aren't anywhere close to the stereotypical drug dealers we might think about.

We are just spinning our wheels with this drug thing. Most all of the people going to prison for it are either small timer addicts selling to people they think are their friends so they can make enough to keep in supply themselves and maybe make a little spare change, or they aren't even really dealers at all. They're just druggies who would help other druggies find drugs as a favor. What do we really accomplish when we take a half a gram of meth off the street? Is that going to raise local meth prices and make it harder for people to get these drugs and get addicted to them? Hell no. Are we stopping the flow of the drugs? Absolutely not. Almost every regular drug user out there will help another drug user get drugs as a favor, and a whole lot of them will do it for profit. There is a never ending supply of sources for these drugs. It's not like taking a serial rapist or burglar off the streets and thereby saving his future victims from being victimized. All the "victims" who are victims by virtue of the fact that they on their own volition get drugs from the guy will still have easy access to drugs from any number of other sources. Locking so many people up is not helping our drug problem in this country.

There is one benefit to incarcerating all of these people though. By doing so we will reduce crime some because some of these people are in fact really bad people who commit all sorts of other crimes. That is true. But, I personally would rather we put them in prison for a long time for committing these other more serious crimes instead of for selling a little bit of dope to other dopers. Personally, I'd much rather a druggie sell a little dope to other druggies rather than steal from me. I feel that stealing and a lot of the other crimes some of these people commit is far more morally culpable and far more of a menace to society than conduct consisting of one druggie selling party supplies to another druggie. It's different if they are selling to children, but most of these guys aren't in trouble for selling to kids. Most of the time they're in trouble for selling to other druggie peers of theirs who are generally around the same age as them. But we punish the thirty year old drug addict who sells a tiny amount of dope to a thirty year old drug addict CI like he is selling to ten year olds. We punish him like he is a kingpin. We're angry about drugs and the problems they cause and we take all of our aggression out on anyone who is caught who is involved in delivering drugs even in a very minor way. We aren't really accomplishing what we are setting out to accomplish though by doing this and we are spending an awful lot of money with this shotgun approach that we shouldn't be spending unless it is to keep the really bad people locked up and away from the rest of us for as long as possible.

If it were up to me we'd send far fewer people to prison in the first place, but a lot of those we do end up sending would spend a lot more time than they do today. There is a core of serious offenders and career criminals that need to be in prison for the good of us all, the longer the better. In real life though most of these people plead to relatively short sentences, and since we have overburdened ourselves so by putting too many in prison we are having to let them all out earlier and earlier. Sentences are getting longer. The same politicians doing that though are having to pass new early release laws and new laws reducing the time people must spend before being eligible for parole because our prisons are too full to keep up with the flow of new convicts. A lot of the really bad ones are in and out of prison over and over again spending more time on the outside than on the inside when it would be best for all of us if they spent no time on the outside.

And we don't do a good job at all of keeping track of them after they get out. Shoot, in my state parole officers can hardly revoke parole anymore because our prisons are too full and parolees can only be revoked for committing really serious crimes. We need people standing over these people making sure they get jobs and stay off the drugs and away from bad influences as much as possible. The addicts need to be drug tested all the time to keep them honest and keep them from falling back into their old ways. They need at least small sanctions every time they screw up. We probably won't change many of the hardcore criminals who are addicts but if we keep them under a close enough watch at least they won't be binging so much on drugs and stealing everyone blind to pay for their expensive habits all the time.

A lot of these addicts aren't such hardcore evil criminals. They do tend to get in trouble over and over for drugs, but that is to be expected from addicts. Some of these guys will never quit. Many others won't quit for years even though they'll suffer all sorts of negative consequences from their addictions. That's the nature of the beast. We could probably cut down on a lot of the problems by tightly monitoring them on probation that doesn't end until they spend a year or so testing clean and living like decent human beings with jobs and steady places to live and that sort of thing. If we drug test them all the time and give them small sanctions like a few days in jail or some community service or something every single time they screw up, a lot of them will eventually get tired of it and straighten up. Being a slave to drugs sucks, and it would suck even worse if you kept having to go to jail for it, even if it was only for a few days at a time. For a lot of them this will take years or may never end but at least they won't be able to stay on tons of drugs all the time and get themselves in a position where they have to sell dope and/or steal to pay for their incredibly expensive habits. We'll win the war of attrition with a lot of them and we'll at least be able to keep a lot of the others who won't quit from causing major problems, and we'll do all of this for considerably less than what we would spend sending them to prison over and over again.

I don't know why we are sending so many people to prison these days. All I know is that we could do a lot better job at dealing with societal problems without wasting all the money we waste warehousing so many people. The brunt of the crime problems we have are really caused mostly by a small core of the people who come into contact with the criminal justice system. The only thing prison is really good for is keeping these few off the streets and away from the rest of us for a while. We could probably reduce crime a good bit and save a lot of money if instead of trying to lock up as many people as we can we would try to lock the really bad ones up longer and deal with the rest using other alternatives besides prison.

[zip]

You, and many others on this thread, have never felt the thrust of evil from these innocent, church going, mistreated thugs. Or maybe it is only Jeff City MO where criminals are glorified. My gas station manager was murdered by a young, innocent teenager, who earlier had beat another person with a baseball bat until he had permanent brain damage. The Prosecutor and judge felt sorry for the kid so he was running the streets killing. A person that stole a gun from my house, was convicted for misuse of a credit device, theft of 2500.00 from Radio Shack, burning a car, breaking into cars (caught because to dropped his cell phone in one of them), in possession stolen property, and on and on, all this with a 2 year Suspended Imposition of Sentence and a 5 year SIS. His time served: 5 days in county jail, 10 days in jail, 30 days in jail with credit given for the time served on the other charges, some restitution and finally a whole 120 days shock incarceration. Whoop de doo. Cry for the poor baby.

[A. Pole]

Somehow this article does not sound right altogether, even if some aspects might have some truth to them.

If we are not to trust our own Judicial system, whose are we to trust.

There is other option than blind trust or giving up - public debate and scrutiny followed by corrections of the system.

It is not by any means perfect, but it certainly is better than most.

It is what I hear, more often that it is the best. I would love to see some solid comparison based on facts and sound analysis.

Americans might not be more criminally inclined than Europeans, but maybe we catch more crooks...

Well, I assume so, but if you put EVERYBODY in prison then EVERY crook will be caught!

[TKDietz]

Things are different everywhere. I think Jefferson City is a lot bigger place than where I live. The population of our entire county is under 60,000, and this is a very law and order oriented community. You wouldn't see a guy here who did what the person you are talking about get a getting a sentence like the one you described. There are nearby counties where one might get a sentence like that for those crimes. Here just the breaking into cars will get someone a prison sentence even if he has a clean record. If someone did all those other crimes along with breaking into cars he's likely to do a pretty good stint here. As much as it may seem like I'm complaining that we lock too many people up, I don't have a problem with thieves going to prison, especially it's clear that it wasn't just a one time screw up.

Don't get me wrong. I don't feel sorry for all these guys. There are clients I have had I'd much rather have prosecuted than defended, but have a different job to do. There are times when I'm able to get clients deals that just floor me. If I were prosecuting the cases I'd be much harder on some of these guys. I have prosecuted before. The system can produce some really screwy, arbitrary results. Sometimes the really bad dangerous people walk with fines and suspended sentences and sometimes relatively minor offenders who aren't that bad who more than anything happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time or something get incredibly long prison sentences. People who have all committed basically the same crimes can get widely varying punishments. It could be because one case has for whatever reason gotten a lot of attention in the community and the prosecutor is worried about political consequences in that one, or it could be for any number of other reasons or combinations of reasons.

It's different from state to state, county to county, town to town, day to day. I might get a suspended sentence deal worked out with a prosecutor for a guy who really ought to go to prison because the prosecutor really wants to go on a fishing trip with his buddies on the day trial is scheduled, or we might butt heads because he's pissed about a fight he got into in the morning with his wife and he'll dig his heals in on a long prison sentence for a guy who normally would have gotten a much better deal. One prosecutor might identify better with something someone has done because he or someone he cares about has been in the same position and either done the same thing or almost did it, and another prosecutor won't identify at all because he or she has had different life experiences. It's all arbitrary. The range of possible punishments is so great and the offers we get and even sentences juries mete out are all over the map.

[zip]

Thanks for the well reasoned, respectful reply. I was too abrupt in my original post so I apologize. It appears that you know these types better than I. BTW, you will soon have FReepmail.

[castlebrew]

thanks for the links!

table #2 of link 1 (on page 3) shows 1,494,216 in jail as of 06/30/2004.

when we subtract "non-citizens" (91,789 - page 5 of link #1), we see there are 1,402,427 citizens incarcerated (1)

from Census Factfinder -2004 data 212,767,197 (18& over) - 34,205,301 (65 & over) = 178,561,896 (2)

(2) divided by (1) => 1 out of 127 +/-, not 1 out of 80.

interesting note on your 1st link, page 4: "The incarceration rate of State and Federal prisoners sentenced to more than 1 year was 486 per 100,000 U.S. residents on June 30, 2004, up from 482 per 100,000 on December 31, 2003." 100,000/486 => 1 in 206 +/-

[TKDietz]

To avoid confusion you shouldn't use the words "jail" and "prison" interchangeably. They are not the same thing. Jails are the local facilities generally funded by counties where people are incarcerated awaiting trials on felonies and misdemeanors and where people tend to be sent after be convicted of misdemeanors and given jail sentences. Prisons are run by either the state or federal government and they are where people go after being sentenced for felonies. Our incarceration rate in state and federal prisons was 486 per 100,000 on December 34, 2004. Our total incarceration rate, including both those locked up in jails after sentencing and those locked up in state and federal prisons, was 724 per 100,000.

I don't know how this guy calculated his numbers, what age brackets he used and so on, but the percentage of people in this country behind bars is at an all time high. If you break it down and just look at the number of young men in prisons and jails it's really high. When you look at the percentage behind bars compared to incarceration rates in the rest of the world our rate of incarceration is incredibly high. If you look at historical numbers for our country our rate is several times higher than it ever was before 1980.

I'll give you one more link to incarceration data. This shows our incarceration rate and numbers of people incarcerated since 1925. These number only include people in state and federal prisons, not those in jails. Note how our incarceration rate in state and federal prisons was 486 in 2004, as we've discussed. Note also how that that number never was as high as 139 per 100,000 prior to 1980. The previous all time record was in 1939 when we had 137 per 100,000 locked up in state and federal prisons. The rise in incarceration rates in the last twenty-five years or so is unprecedented in this country. It is true that we now lock up people at a rate several times the rate we ever used to lock people up in the years prior to 1980. It is true that we now have the absolute highest incarceration rate in the world, and that we lock up more of our people in total than any other country in the world. Take a look at the world incarceration rates from the link in my post # 114. It's pretty interesting to see our rate compared to all those other countries.

Number and rate per 100,000 of prisoners in state and federal prisons from 1925 through 2004:

http://www.albany.edu/sourcebook/pdf/t6282004.pdf


World incarceration rates (see post # 114 for instructions on how to find the data):

http://www.prisonstudies.org/

[TKDietz]

"December 34, 2004"

Should have read: "December 31, 2004"

[inquest]

Just to get further clarification on your comments - this is the first time I've seen anyone explain clearly the distinction between prisons and jails. But as for the term "incarceration", is that generally understood to apply to one more than the other, or is does it cover both prisons and jails equally?

[TKDietz]

Both.

[castlebrew]

Jails are the local facilities generally funded by counties where people are incarcerated awaiting trials on felonies and misdemeanors and where people tend to be sent after be convicted of misdemeanors and given jail sentences. Prisons are run by either the state or federal government and they are where people go after being sentenced for felonies.

a distinction without a difference; typical twisting involved in making the statistics fit the predefined agenda.

What is your source for those definitions? My working copy of Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary (1980, pg 613) notes "prison" as a synonym for "jail"."Jail" and "Prison" both come up as synonyms for each other using the Microsoft Word thesaurus.Roget's Thesaurus (1972, pg. 167 notes "jail" as a synonym for "prison" at entry #752.

if you're incarcerated, it makes little difference in the big view whether it's in a "jail", or in a "prison". You're still "in the big house".

[TKDietz]

I don't really recall what my source was for that tidbit of information. I've just been practicing law for a lot of years and that's the way it appears to work everywhere. Jails tend to be places funded by cities and counties. Prisons are funded by the states or the federal government. People tend to go to jails for misdemeanors and prisons for felonies. Misdemeanors are generally going to have maximum sentences of a year or less, and felonies go all the way up to life sentences or death sentences. There is some overlap with the way prisons and jails are used. Certainly people charged with felonies will often be sitting in county jails awaiting trial. A lot who have been convicted are sitting in county jails waiting for prison beds to come open, and there are some felons housed in county jails on contract with the states to to make room in the prisons.

It kind of sounds like you are implying that I am trying to pull a fast one on people with statistics. That sort of ticks me off. The only reason I had to bring up the distinction between jails and prisons is because some of the available statistics only include those in prisons and some include those both in jails and prisons and I didn't want anyone to get confused. I realize that people do often use the terms jail and prison interchangeably, and that the distinction may not be made in all dictionaries, especially those written for lay persons. If you were to look at legal dictionaries you would find more precise definitions. I don't have my Blacks Law Dictionary handy but I looked on Findlaw and their definitions from Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of Law for jails, penitentiaries, and prisons are as follows:

"jail
: a place of confinement for persons held in lawful custody

specif
: such a place under the jurisdiction of a local government (as a county) for the confinement of persons awaiting trial or those convicted of minor crimes"

http://dictionary.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/results.pl?co=dictionary.lp.findlaw.com&topic=e3/e38c8d696da6cd423db8ea98eb8161a0

"penitentiary
['pe-ne-'ten-che-re]

pl: -ries
: a state or federal prison for the punishment and reformation of convicted felons"

http://dictionary.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/results.pl?co=dictionary.lp.findlaw.com&topic=c2/c23246913683fd9686139782993ebe8a

"prison
: an institution usu. under state control for confinement of persons serving sentences for serious crimes"

http://dictionary.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/results.pl?co=dictionary.lp.findlaw.com&topic=1b/1b35196eba016af4e0f27bb95413d00a

Their definitions for prisons and penitentiaries are a little different. I've always used those two words interchangeably. Maybe I'm wrong. I'm sure as hell not trying to pull a fast one on anybody though. I did not and would not twist any statistics and I resent your accusations.

[TKDietz]

I wanted to give you one more quick note on the reason why some statistics only include people in prisons and others include people in both prisons and jails. Every county I think is going to have a county jail these days. In huge cities these can be huge facilities. More often then not though these are just little rinky-dink places with a few beds. Ours only has a few dozen beds. A lot have less than that. These places are run by the sheriff's departments in the respective counties. Cities will sometimes also have jails which usually just consist of one or more holding cells where people are usually kept for no more than a few hours awaiting trials or hearings in city or municipal court, or after being sentenced and before being transported to the county jails. There may be some city jails that people actually serve sentences in, I don't know. Anyway, these facilities have not always been great about keeping statistics. Now that we are in the computer age, things are a lot better than they used to be, but before computers a lot of these places were not keeping any statistical information or were at least not reporting it. Large prison systems have been keeping this data for a long time, but not little local facilities. When we look at historical incarceration rates, the only reliable data available from say thirty years back and before is for state and federal prisons. There just isn't data available before that on the numbers of people incarcerated in all the small jails run by cities and counties throughout the nation. That's the biggest reason why a lot of these statistics you will find only cover prisons but not jails.

[castlebrew]

Well, as you can see from the date stamp of this post, I haven't exactly been plugged into this thread.

Seeing as the report in your link #1 was discussing state and federal prisoners, municipal-level incarceration (of any stripe - yes, pun intended) was probably not included in the statistic quoted in my earlier post.

At best, your link #1 indicated 1 in 206 +/- (486 per 100,000) vs. 1 in 80 purported by the author of the article. The best I could calculate was 1 in 127 +/-. The author of the article is overstating incarceration rates by anywhere from 50% ((127/80) -1) to 150% ((206-80)-1)

It is incumbent on the purveyor of a statistical analysis to present his methodology so that the reader can understand the viewpoint of the purveyor, and make an informed decision.

All I am saying is give intellectual honesty (and the scientific method) a chance...If the methodology is solid, the stats will stand the harsh light of day.

[TKDietz]

I don't know how this guy calculated his numbers. He wasn't very clear in saying he was excluding children and the elderly. Did he mean little kids who hadn't reach their teen years and people seventy-five and above, or did he mean people under eighteen and fifty-five and over? I don't know exactly what he meant. It could be that the 1 in 80 figure is accurate though. I'm not sure how you came up with the 1 out of 127 estimate, but you did say you were looking at the 486 per 100,000 overall incarceration rate. The author did say that we have one out of 80 "behind bars," which could mean prisons and jails as well. The government link I gave you said 726 per 100,000 were in either prisons or jails. The author only mentioned prison in other parts of his article, but I suspect he is using the word "prison" in the same sense most lay people would, using it to mean both prison and jail. I've seen the international incarceration statistics. They do not make distinctions between prisons and jails. They include all those behind bars. In many countries, there is no difference at all between prisons and jails.

Maybe the one out of 80 claim is correct, maybe not. The claim that caught my eye most was his claim that 95 to 97 percent of federal cases were resolved by coerced plea. That's just nonsense. 95 to 97 percent probably are resolved by plea, but are they all "coerced?" Shoot no. In my experience most people are guilty and they will admit it. They want to plead.

Sometimes for the reasons I discussed above people who swear they are innocent and in some cases probably are do plead. And there are other things I didn't mention that add to the coercive nature of the system, especially for those who already have criminal records. Those with criminal records really cannot testify on their own behalf unless they aren't worried about their past coming in. If they testify, past convictions come in to impeach them. More and more judges seem to let things in even if they don't testify to show things like motive, intent, knowledge, plan, or lack of mistake. These people know that if jurors see what they did before they are liable to convict these people just because we have a tendency to think that if people broke the law in the past, they probably did it this time too, and the worse the previous crime or crimes the more likely jurors are to convict and punish severely this time. And if people are on a suspended sentence or probation for a previous offense, forget it. Prosecutors will file a petition to revoke (PTR) their probation or suspended sentence, and all they have to do to succeed on that is prove that in any minor way a person violated any of the many terms and conditions of his suspended sentence or probation. Then they'll make us an offer on the new charge and agree to either drop the PTR or just run the sentences concurrent. The PTR has to be handled within sixty days of his arrest, so it will come up long before the trial date on his new case. If the guy doesn't plead on his new case then, the judge will probably send him to prison on his PTR and then he'll also have to risk trial on his new offense. Most will plead rather than go that route even if the new case is bogus.

One more coercive tactic that prosecutors use that I absolutely hate is something they do when one co-defendant wants to exonerate another. I just had this happen the other day. Two guys were caught with several pounds of marijuana, eighty pounds or so I think. These cases all tend to run together in my mind and it's hard to remember all the particulars. Anyway, the pot was in a suitcase in the trunk. One of the two the day of the stop said it was all his and the other guy didn't know it was there, but they charged both guys anyway. The guy who confessed then went on to do some work for the DEA, setting up guys in his home state. In exchange for that, county prosecutors gave him a great deal on the pot case in my state even though he had an extensive record. Now, when it came time to plead or go to trial, as they often do, the prosecutors said that if the guy getting the good deal were to try to exonerate my client, all bets were off. They would withdraw their sweet offer, and nail the guy like he deserved to be nailed. Naturally, he wasn't willing to exonerate my client anymore. And of course as is their standard practice, prosecutors would not let him plead until my client pled or went to trial. My client felt like he had to plead because this other guy was out to save himself and would probably change his previous story when he git on the stand at trial. We got the best deal we could get and he pled.

This is a coercive tactic that happens all the time and one that really ticks me off. It's the kind of thing that does result in innocent people pleading guilty to crimes they did not commit.

[castlebrew]

your first sentence finally comes around to my original point: there's lies, damn lies, and statistics (Mark Twain).

As to how I reached my #'s, please check back to my post #129:
thanks for the links!

table #2 of link 1 (on page 3) shows 1,494,216 in jail as of 06/30/2004.

when we subtract "non-citizens" (91,789 - page 5 of link #1), we see there are 1,402,427 citizens incarcerated (1)

from Census Factfinder -2004 data 212,767,197 (18& over) - 34,205,301 (65 & over) = 178,561,896 (2)

(2) divided by (1) => 1 out of 127 +/-, not 1 out of 80. interesting note on your 1st link, page 4: "The incarceration rate of State and Federal prisoners sentenced to more than 1 year was 486 per 100,000 U.S. residents on June 30, 2004, up from 482 per 100,000 on December 31, 2003." 100,000/486 => 1 in 206 +/-

at least I showed how I reached my conclusions.

your 726 per 100,000 is 1 out of 137 (= 100,000 / 726) - still a far cry from 1 in 80.

[TKDietz]

"your 726 per 100,000 is 1 out of 137 (= 100,000 / 726) - still a far cry from 1 in 80."

Now, you aren't subtracting "children and the elderly" when you make this calculation. The author asked, "why is one of every 80 Americans (not counting children and the elderly) locked away from family, friends, career and life?" Both those in jail and in prison are locked away, so it would be fair to include both those in jails and in prisons in the calculation. If you separate out those under 18 and those 65 and older like you did in your other calculation, leaving 178,561,896 people, and then divide that by the number of people in prisons and jails, 2,131,180, there would be about one in almost 84 behind bars. That puts the author in the ballpark of being right, and depending upon which data sources and he was using, it may be that his calculations actually may have resulted in a one out of 80 answer. Even looking at U.S. census numbers we can see all sorts of discrepancies in one report from another about how many people actually lived here. We see the same thing in the incarceration numbers. Even something as simple as the date the numbers come from can make a fairly big difference. These USDJ numbers we are using are from June 30, 2004. There were more behind bars on December 31, 2004. And looking at the USDOJ numbers I can see one odd discrepancy I can't quite explain. They say that as of June 30, 2004, there were 1,494,216 people in prisons. On the same date, there were 784,538 "under jail supervision." But a portion of those were supervised by the jail in "alternate programs," presumably things like house arrest, leaving only 713,990 actually in jail custody. Anyway, when you add the 1,494,216 people in state and federal prisons on June 30, 2004, with the 713,990 in jails on that date, you come up with 2,208,206 behind bars instead of the other figure they provided. Work the calculation using that number divided into the number of people 18 through 64, and you come up with one out of 80.76 people behind bars on June 30, 2004. I wouldn't say the author is entirely off base making the one out of 80 claim. I wish he had had told us exactly which numbers he was using and how he did his calculations, but his numbers do not appear to be way out of line with reality to me.

Here's the USDOJ link again: http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/pjim04.pdf

I don't agree with everything the author was saying. I do think we've gone crazy with locking so many people up in this country though. I work in the criminal justice system and I pay attention to these numbers. I see how things work within the system. I see our prisons and jails in my state being way overcrowded, despite massive budget increases over the years and all sort of new facilities being built. Our county jail is so full that we have to send people to other county jails and pay for them to be housed because we can't afford another new jail at the moment. They aren't even really putting people in jail here for misdemeanors anymore because there is no room. Almost everyone is getting signature bonds when they are arrested. Some of these people should be going to jail and staying there. Our prisons are so full that parole officers can no longer seek to get parole revoked for parolees who commit crimes. These guys practically have to kill someone to get sent back on a parole violation. The new crime they are accused of committing has to be in our state's highest felony classification below a death penalty case before parole can be revoked. Child molesting, kidnapping, burglary, and so on are not generally in that high of a classification. It's crazy. Our legislators who keep passing "tough on crime" laws to appease voters are at the same time having to pass laws to let people out of prison earlier and earlier. People who are really bad who should be in prison for the good of us all are getting out earlier and earlier. We've just gone nuts with locking people up and we're starting to pay the price for it.

No, I really don't see any good reason why we have to have the highest incarceration rate in the world along with the highest number of persons actually behind bars. This is America, the land of the free, yet we lock up more people than Russia or China or any other country in the world. You can say that some of these countries shoot people or chop off their hands if they do wrong, but in reality that is only a tiny few of them. Most are a lot like us and have the same types of problems we have but they deal with them in different ways than us. What we are doing is not something we've always done. There is nothing traditional about it. It's something that just started about two and a half decades ago and it has gotten out of hand. It is not the "American way." It is not conservative, in any sense of the word. It's just crazy.

One more time, just for your reading enjoyment, I'll post a link to the number and rate per 100,000 of prisoners in state and federal prisons from 1925 through 2004. Again, this only includes those in prisons, not jails:

http://www.albany.edu/sourcebook/pdf/t6282004.pdf