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Do you believe that "Americans are 12 times more criminally inclined than Europeans"?

Te implication is that Europe imprisons the "right" amount of people. Maybe Europe is 1/12 as effective at protecting society from criminals.....

Te implication is that Europe imprisons the "right" amount of people. Maybe Europe is 1/12 as effective at protecting society from criminals.....

Read my tagline. There is a critical mass when the prison industry becomes so big that cannot be controlled.

We've gone crazy with locking people up in this country though. Prior to 1980, the all time record incarceration rate was 137 per 100,000 in state and federal prisons back in 1939. Rates were climbing in the 1970's, and in 1980 we hit a new record of 139 per 100,000 in state and federal prisons. In 2004, that had climbed to 486 per 100,000. This is completely unprecedented, and I'm only counting those in state and federal prisons. When we add the number in jails in the total on December 31, 2004 was 724 per 100,000. The absolute highest incarceration rate in European Union countries then was in the United Kingdom, with their rate of 139 per 100,000 behind bars in prisons and jails. Our incarceration rate of 724 per 100,000 is the highest in the world. Russia is behind us with 600 and something per 100,000. The other countries with the top ten incarceration rates are places like Kazakhstan, Belarus, and other bastions of freedom like that and for the most part they are in the 400's or 500's per 100,000. We have not only the highest incarceration rate in the world, but also the greatest number of people behind bars than any other country. Shoot, China only has 1.5 million behind bars compared to our 2.2 million and they have over a billion people compared to something like 280 million here. Even though less than 5% of the world's population lives in the U.S., about 25% of all the people behind bars in the world are behind bars right here in the land of the free. That is crazy. We are supposedly a free country.

What's worse is that even though we lock up such an insane number of people our crime rates are still among the highest in developed nations. Our politicians keep taking the easy way out making crimes out of things that weren't crimes before, turning misdemeanors into felonies, and increasing the punishments for various felonies and adding all sorts of new sentence enhancements. It accomplishes nothing in real life but it's an easy way to act like they are trying to solve crime problems without actually rolling up their sleeves and trying things that might work but that might piss off a few voters. At the same time our prisons and jails are getting so full that we can't build them fast enough to house all of the people we are locking up so we are having to let people go earlier and earlier. The same politicians who vote for more laws locking more people up keep having to vote for early release programs and measures that will reduce the time inmates must serve before they are eligible for parole. It's all screwed up. I work in the criminal justice system. In every town you'll have a few serious offenders and a small percentage of not so serious offenders who seem to be in trouble all the time who cause most of the problems in our communities. Most of these people need to be locked up for a long time to protect the rest of us. Most of the others need to be dealt with in some other fashion. We'll go bankrupt if we don't figure out another way of dealing with crime. What we have been doing in the last two and a half decades or so is neither conservative nor particularly effective. There is no doubt in my mind we could deal with crime much more effectively and for a hell of a lot less money than we do now.