We're #1! We're #1!
Posted on 02/29/2008 5:13:51 AM PST by Carbonsteel
NEW YORK — More than one in every 100 American adults is in jail or prison — making the United States the world's incarceration leader, according to a new report tracking the surge in U.S. inmate population.
The report, released Thursday by the Pew Center on the States, urged U.S. states to curtail corrections spending by placing fewer low-risk offenders behind bars.
"The United States imprisons more people than any country in the world," the report said. Using updated state-by-state data, it said more than 2.3 million adults were held in U.S. prisons or jails at the start of 2008 — or one of every 99.1 adults out of a total population of some 230 million adults.
The numbers put the United States far ahead of more populous China, which it said has 1.5 million people behind bars, and Russia, which has 890,000. The Pew report cited January statistics from the "World Prison Brief" released by the International Center for Prison Studies at London's King's College.
It also said the U.S. — with 750 inmates per 100,000 people — "is the global leader in the rate at which it incarcerates its citizenry, outpacing nations like South Africa and Iran."
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
and how many of them really ARE Americans??
Maybe these people should stop breaking the law (just a thought).
Yeah, but the US doesn't shoot inmates and sell 'em for spare parts.
This is because we are a nation of laws. I was down in some rough part of Caracas, Venezuela a couple of weeks ago. What I saw there was much lawlessness, drunkenness, a survival of the fittest culture. Believe me when I say this, we in America have a lot to be thankful for.
That’s what i was thinking: maybe we’re locking more up because we have stupid laws...?
Comparisons to China and Russia are misleading. The US prefers to store their crminals while those countries might just eliminate some.
That's a part of it, but probably it has more to do with the fact that we are moderate in our dealings with criminals. We don't go too lenient, like they do in Europe, and just give you time served and probation for murder, nor do we shoot you in the back of the head because we need your kidneys, like they are wont to do in China.
We're #1! We're #1!
This problem is easily solved. Just make crime legal.
“The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. “
Ayn Rand.
Mark
That’s because there are too few executions...
Steve Martin: "I FORGOT that murder was a crime."
Somalia, Darfur, and Kenya have no prisons. The concept of a prison system is considered a waste of resources in much of the world.
The Corrections officers I talked to are tired of these young students getting locked up for dumb ‘crimes’ and being placed next to violent offenders. But the CO's also know that lots of money comes from mommies and daddies paying fines for these students. Then taxpayers had to lock them up and pay for a new prison.
The WOD is a scam on taxpayers perpetrated by the law-enforcement "industry".
These statistics are not that difficult. The authorities DO know how many people they have in jail, and who they are.
The numbers were "especially startling" for some groups, the report said. "While one in 30 men between the ages of 20 and 34 is behind bars, for black males in that age group the figure is one in nine." Hm, 1 in 9.. That's a pretty dire situation.
Only about 20% are there for drug related crimes -- dealing and trafficking. Put another way, we could set them all free and we'd still be number one. By a huge margin.
In 2003, 68% of prison and jail inmates were members of racial or ethnic minority groups. More minorities are in prison than in college. Remove them from the statistic, and we drop from 2.3 million to 740,000 -- less than Russia.
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