Are We Safe Yet ?
(Reuters) - The U.S. penal system, the world's largest, maintained its steady growth in 2004, the Department of Justice reported on Sunday.
The latest official half-yearly figures found the nation's prison and jail population at 2,131,180 in the middle of last year, an increase of 2.3 percent over 2003.
The United States has incarcerated 726 people per 100,000 of its population, seven to 10 times as many as most other democracies. The rate for England is 142 per 100,000, for France 91 and for Japan 58.
The figures issued by the department's statistical unit showed that 12.6 percent of black males in their late twenties were behind bars. The comparable rate for Hispanic males was 3.6 percent and for whites 1.7 percent.
"Unless we promote alternatives to prison, the nation will continue to lead the world in imprisonment," said Jason Ziedenberg, executive director of the Justice Policy Institute, a think-tank that studies prison issues.
According to the Justice Department, violent crime in the United States fell by over 33 percent from 1994 to 2003 and property crimes fell by 23 percent.
Yet the prison population has continued to climb, increasing an annual average of 3.5 percent since 1995, partly due to high recidivism. Within three years of their release, two of every three prisoners are back behind bars.
Criminologists attribute the growth in the prison population to "get tough on crime" policies that have subjected hundreds of thousands of nonviolent drug and property offenders to long mandatory sentences.
"We have to be concerned about an overloaded system which sentences many offenders quickly and is not dong a good job of sorting out people who should be incarcerated from people for whom other responses would produce better, less expensive results," said Malcolm Young, executive director of the Sentencing Project, a Washington think-tank.
The rise in the prison population varies by state. Since 1998, 12 states experienced stable or declining incarceration rates but crime rates in those states declined at the same rate as in the other 38.
Texas, with 704 per 100,000 people in state prisons, incarcerates almost seven times as many as Maine, at 149 per 100,000.
It costs around $22,000 to lock up one person for a year. The United States spends about $57 billion annually on its prison and jail system.
Women remain the fastest-growing segment of the prison population, increasing by 2.9 percent over the year to over 103,000. In 1980, the United States imprisoned 12,000 women.
In addition, the United States jails around 283,000 people with serious mental illnesses and almost 92,000 foreigners.
Why does America produce so many more criminals than any other nation on Earth?
One key factor may be that we have spent the last 200 years writing laws, and for the last 40 we have been letting corporate lawyers ghost write them, putting their interests ahead of the public good, then the politicians they own just sign off on it. Everytime anything bad happens in America, the media goes and sticks a microphone in a politicians face and asks him "what are you going to do about it?". And "nothing" would always be the wrong answer.
Another reason could be that we spend vastly more on our justice system than any other nation. Judges, Lawyers, Prosecutors, Police, and Probation Officers, all need a steady supply of criminals in order to get their fair share of the pie. Maybe other nations have a higher ratio of criminals in their population than we do, but they remain un-incarcerated.
In could be something in our culturally diverse collective gene pool that in an environment where wealth is so unevenly distributed the temptation to make your living illegally is the path of least resistance for a large percentage of our population. Even though we may incarcerate a larger percentage of our populace than any nation on Earth, I think its a safe bet to assume that the vast majority of our criminals are still freely walking our streets.
Then there is the obvious answer. Most criminals released from our prison system are not afraid to go back. In fact I believe many of them prefer the life inside to struggling to achieve legitimate economic independence on the outside.
But whatever the reason may be, Islam seems to be
becoming the religion of choice in our prison systems. This is no coincidence, as it was designed to appeal to the oppressed, and its skewed sense of justice resonates with our prison population.
Which brings me to my point.
Iraq may be prevented from ever achieving stability by the actions of what MAY be a small percentage of its population. Whenever a relatively small group of determined individuals are willing to exterminate the entire police force in a given town, and any elected official that shows his face in public runs a high risk of assassination, its pretty easy to keep stability from ever occurring. Relativily safe attacks against unprotectable infrastructure can bring any prosperous nation to its knees.
Is there no risk of this ever happening in America?We certainly have enough willing criminals to go around, but they have never coordinated their efforts against our law-enforcement agencies. They have all been looking after their own self-interests in the past. But what if the widespread adoption of the principles of Islamic Jihad gave them a common cause here? What if our criminals ever coordinated their efforts in an attempt to destabilize our society?
Its convenient to think that law-abiding American citizens would organize and repulse this attack, but thats sound more like something our ancestors were capable of than modern day Americans. Most would just hunker down and hide, hoping somebody else will take care of the problem for them. Thats what you get when a society has been legislated into letting the authorities take care off them for too long.
