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If prosecutors stopped plea bargaining, we'd go bankrupt. Almost all cases are resolved by plea bargain. I think nationwide only around 2% of all felony cases go to trial. Even with such a small percentage going to trial, court dockets are full to the point of being backed up and judges, prosecutors, and public defenders have more cases than they know what to do with. If 100% of these cases went to trial, we'd need a whole lot more people to run the system, more judges, more bailiffs, more prosecutors, public defenders, court reporters, clerks guards, and so on. We'd need to build more courthouses and call an awful lot more people in for jury duty. And instead of only have 2.1 million in prisons and jails, we'd end up with tens of millions and we'd need prison beds for all of them.

We have an addiction to prison in this country. We use it as the silver bullet to fix everything. Our prisons are so full that local legislators are always trying to figure out a way to let people out earlier to make room for the new guys. On average, people will spend just around two and a half years in before they are released. That average includes the lifers and those who will only spend a few months.

People do not come out of prison better people either. A lot of them who go are just young screw ups, not serious threats to anyone. They go in, get beaten and raped, and then join gangs, white supremacist groups, the Muslim Brotherhood, whatever, just for protection. They come out with jail-house tattoos, bad attitudes, a bunch of new criminal friends and new criminal skills. About 70% will be rearrested on new felony charges within three years of their release.

If it were up to me we would try to lock the really bad guys up a lot longer, but we wouldn't send nearly as many people to prison in the first place. The only thing prison is any good for is keeping the really bad people away from the rest of us for a while. Sending so many who aren't a great threat to the rest of us just costs us a fortune and probably turns a lot of these people into hardcore criminals who after going to prison are a much worse threat to society than would ever haver been had they not gone to prison.

Does it not bother you at all that we in the land of the free we lock up more people than any other country in the entire world? You know this isn't the way it always was. Our prison populations didn't start exploding till the late 1970's. Before that, they were relatively low compared to the rest of the world, around average. Prison incarceration rates stayed relatively flat, fluctuating only from slightly below a 100 per 100,000 on up to I think an all time high pre-1978 or so of 137 per 100,000. Then all of the sudden incarceration rates started doubling, tripling, quadrupling...just going crazy. There isn't anything conservative about our liberal use of prison at all. It's completely out of hand. Now we are becoming a nation with more and more laws, far more police per capita than we ever had, including these undercover secret police everywhere (a hallmark of a police state), and we lock up more people than either Russia or China or any other nation in the world for that matter. I can't believe this doesn't bother more people. It scares the hell out of me.