Taibbi: U.S. has two criminal justice systems

[HT: Chief].  Taibbi's latest article is worth reading in full -- with outrageous personal anecdotes for my conservative readers! -- but this pretty much sums it up:

The Madoff case proved that in order to actually be convicted and jailed for a Wall Street crime, you practically have to show up, weeping and spontaneously confessing, on the doorstep of the regulatory authorities.

In the early 90s, the US convicted more than 900 people in criminal prosecutions connected to the savings and loan crisis, a mass-fraud scheme similar to the sub-prime mess, but far less serious. This time around, the number is zero. Not one significant Wall Street executive has seen the inside of a jail cell for even one night for the egregious crimes connected to the financial crisis.

Meanwhile, the US boasts the largest prison population in the history of humanity, edging out even the gulag under Stalin.

There are a lot of reasons for the disparity, but two stand out: there are virtually no cops on the Wall Street/rich white people beat, and what few regulators there are increasingly don’t believe that paper or computer thefts in the millions or billions are “crime crimes” that warrant jail time.

Black people and better-off white people have almost completely different experiences with U.S. police and the criminal justice system. It's really two systems masquerading as one.

The US justice divide: why crime and punishment in Wall Street and Ferguson are so different

By Matt Taibbi

October 17, 2014 | Guardian

URL: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/oct/17/us-justice-divide-crime-punishment-wall-street-ferguson

News digest / Catching up on news (08.24.2014)

Here's a news roundup from the past few weeks. Sorry I haven't had time to re-post these with the thoughtful and incisive commentary that you've come to expect from me:

"How Isis came to be," By Ali Khadery, August 22, 2014, Guardian. URL: http://gu.com/p/4xx9z  -- FASCINATING, ESP. CONSIDERING THE U.S. HAS ARMED ISIS TWICE ALREADY

"Obama's legacy could be a revitalized NATO," By Anne Applebaum, August 22, 2014, Washington Post. URL:http://wapo.st/1p27Z8v -- A SCARIER RUSSIA DEMANDS A STRONGER NATO

"New Study Debunks Big Corporations' Tax Inversion Arguments," By Ben Hallman, August 19, 2014, Huffington Post. URL:http://huff.to/1vdX4Ow  -- THE FACTS DON'T SUPPORT INVERSION

"Left out in the cold by the ice bucket fad," By Michael Hiltzik, August 21, 2014, Los Angeles Times. URL:http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/08/21/237217/michael-hiltzik-left-out-in-the.html --  DONATE MONEY; CONSERVE WATER

"US still has time to stake out a position of strength in Ukraine," By John Bolton, August 21, 2014, Los Angeles Times. URL:  http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/08/21/237223/us-still-has-time-to-stake-out.html#storylink=cpy -- USUALLY I DISAGREE WITH 'YOSEMITE SAM' BOLTON, BUT HE'S BASICALLY CORRECT

"Shoddy US roads, bridges take a toll on the economy," By Don Lee, August 17, 2014, Los Angeles Times. URL:http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/08/17/236762/shoddy-us-roads-bridges-take-a.html  -- WHY LIBERALS AND DEMOCRATS CAN'T RUN AND WIN ON THIS SIMPLE FACT IS BEYOND MY UNDERSTANDING

"Among world leaders, the trend for acting like Vladimir Putin is catching on," By Adam Taylor, August 14, 2014, Washington Post. URL: http://wapo.st/1mKGRLp  -- JUST TAKE YOUR SHIRT OFF IF YOU WANT TO BE LIKE PUTIN!

"The GOP’s war on voters continues in Virginia," By Editorial Board, August 14, 2014, Washington Post. URL:http://wapo.st/1sHGEjf -- PESKY VOTERS! WISH THEY'D JUST STAY AT HOME!

"The case for free tampons," By Jessica Valenti, August 14, 2014, Guardian. URL: http://gu.com/p/4vjeg -- IT GENERATED A LOT OF BUZZ ON THE INTERNETS

"City-Run Gas Station Makes Waves In Southeastern Kentucky," By Emil Moffatt, August 13, 2014, NPR. URL:http://www.npr.org/2014/08/13/340085122/city-run-gas-station-makes-waves-in-southeastern-kentucky?sc=17&f=1001&utm_source=iosnewsapp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=app  -- IN A TRULY FREE MARKET GOVERNMENT GETS A CHANCE TO COMPETE WITH PRIVATE GOODS AND SERVICES!

"Economic inequality, not just wages at the bottom, needs to be addressed," By Harold Meyerson, August 13, 2014, Washington Post. URL: http://wapo.st/1kCqWmT  -- AMEN BROTHER

"WATCH this to understand the level of Russia’s sickness," August 9, 2014, YouTube. URL: http://youtu.be/EwwBFJkwZ_Q --EVER WONDERED WHAT FASCIST STATE THEATER LOOKS LIKE?  HERE YOU GO

"Teenagers in US prisons: it's time for the savagery and neglect to finally end," By Sadhbh Walshe, August 7, 2014, Guardian. URL: http://gu.com/p/4vh3h -- OUR COLLECTIVE SHAME

Report: Reducing U.S. prison population reduces crime

Here's yet another conservative myth busted [emphasis mine]:

The [Sentencing Project's] report points to New York, New Jersey and California as examples of how moving toward more lenient punishments for non-violent offenders is linked to lower rates of both violent crime and property crime. While the nation's state prison population shot up by 10 percent from 1999 to 2012 with violent and property crime dropping by 26 percent and 24 percent, respectively, New York and New Jersey each slashed their prison populations by 26 percent and saw crime drop a respective 31 percent and 30 percent during the same period.

"At least in three states we now know that the prison population can be reduced by about 25% with little or no adverse effect on public safety," The Sentencing Project's Marc Mauer and Nazgol Ghandnoosh wrote in their report. "Individual circumstances vary by state, but policymakers should explore the reforms in New York, New Jersey, and California as a guide for other states."

Locking Up Fewer People Doesn't Lead To Increased Crime, Report Says

By Lydia O'Connor

July 24, 2014 | Huffington Post

URL: http://huff.to/1AhblxG

Was American Revolution worth it? Revisiting the 'American Dream'

This July 4th we can stop and ponder: was the American Revolution worth it? Here's what NPR had to say about the "American Dream," i.e. social and economic upward mobility:

So, in the 19th century in the U.S., there's unbelievable economic mobility. If your father, for example, was an unskilled laborer, sort of the lowest end of the working hierarchy, then you had an 80 percent chance of doing some more skilled, more highly paid job than your father. At the same time, in the U.K., you had about a 50 percent chance. Half the children of unskilled laborers were unskilled laborers themselves. But by just after World War II, the U.S. and U.K. are converging and the differences start to disappear. And by 1970, the U.K. has pulled ahead. So, by the 1970s, the children of unskilled laborers are more likely to do be doing something higher paying in the U.K. than in the U.S.

Why is that so?  Why is the "American Dream" more alive in Britain today than in America?  There are two basic theories, according to NPR:

• By the 20th century, the U.S. was a mature economy like Britain, without all the exceptional opportunities for growth that exist in a young, expanding nation.

• In early-mid 20th century, the welfare state and education in Britain grew at a faster pace.

These two theories are not mutually exclusive.  I would also point out the respective rates of unionization in the U.S. and UK: 11.1 percent vs. 25.8 percent.  The average in OECD countries for trade union density is 17 percent.  Nordic socialist paradises Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden, which top almost every global indicator of economic and social well-being, have well over 50 percent of their workers in trade unions.  In the U.S. we blame falling wages all on globalization, but then we should ask why wages aren't falling elsewhere in G-8 countries?  Unions have a lot to do with it.

And then there is the U.S. tax system, which for the past 30 years has discriminated against wages in favor of income earned through interest and financial securities, thereby inflating inequality and crushing the "American Dream."  Remember this chart?:

Paul Pirie for WaPo  gives us more socio-economic data to ponder:

Most Americans work longer hours and have fewer paid vacations and benefits — including health care — than their counterparts in most advanced countries. Consider also that in the CIA World Factbook, the United States ranks 51st in life expectancy at birth. Working oneself into an early grave does not do much for one’s happiness quotient. This year the United States tied for 14th in “life satisfaction” on an annual quality-of-life study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. That puts the United States behind Canada (eighth) and Australia (12th). A report co-authored last year by the economist Jeffrey Sachs ranked the United States 10th in the world for happiness — again behind Canada and Australia. The Sachs study found that the United States has made “striking economic and technological progress over the past half century without gains in the self-reported happiness of the citizenry. Instead, uncertainties and anxieties are high, social and economic inequalities have widened considerably, social trust is in decline, and confidence in government is at an all-time low.”

But the difference is not just in economics or happiness, but also liberty.  Pirie points out that the British Empire (including Canada) abolished slavery in 1833, a full 32 years befoe the U.S. ratification of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution. Today's slavery is the U.S. prison-industrial complex that incarcerates more adults, in both absolute and relative terms, than any other country by a wide margin, including Red China and Russia.  

And speaking of Americans' liberty, I have three words for you: N-S-A.  Do I really need to say more?  It doesn't matter, the spooks are archiving this post anyway.

Today, having mentioned some of these factoids to a Brit, I joked about our reneging the Declaration of Independence.  He said Britons are glad America is no longer their problem; they can't imagine trying to govern the U.S.  I joked back, "Yeah, we have enough trouble dealing with places like Texas!"  Can you imagine British PM David Cameron trying to talk sense to the folks in U.S. flyover country? You start to wonder who got the better end of the deal when the U.S. declared its independence....   

Happy 4th of July, everybody!  Have a hotdog and light off a roman candle for me.

UPDATE: If you think I'm unpatriotic, here's a guy who really can't stand the 4th of July: "Hatetriot's Day: July 4th Is America's Crappiest Holiday."

'Safety valve' to avoid mandatory sentences

Finally!  Lawmakers should make laws and let judges judge; they should not hamstring or box-in judges. Our federal prisons are bulging with non-violent drug offenders because of stupid mandatory sentencing rules that make judges irrelevant in the process.

Today Rand Paul and Pat Leahy Introduced a Bill to Fix Our Atrocious Federal Mandatory Minimum Laws

By Mike Riggs

March 20, 2013 | Reason

URL: http://reason.com/blog/2013/03/20/rand-paul-and-pat-leahy-introduce-a-bill

GOP establishment pundit: U.S. prisons are 'torture'

Deceiv'st thou me, mine eye?  Lo! boon unsought!  

First he decides, 6 years too late, that the Government should break up the Too Big To Fail banks, and now this? ...Is crusty conservative curmudgeon George Will really seeing the light when it comes to the American Gulag?:

America, with 5 percent of the world’s population, has 25 percent of its prisoners. Mass incarceration, which means a perpetual crisis of prisoners re-entering society, has generated understanding of solitary confinement’s consequences when used as a long-term condition for an estimated 25,000 inmates in federal and state “supermax” prisons — and perhaps 80,000 others in isolation sections within regular prisons. Clearly, solitary confinement involves much more than the isolation of incorrigibly violent individuals for the protection of other inmates or prison personnel.

Federal law on torture prohibits conduct “specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering.” And “severe” physical pain is not limited to “excruciating or agonizing” pain, or pain “equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily functions, or even death.” The severe mental suffering from prolonged solitary confinement puts the confined at risk of brain impairment.

[...] 

Mass incarceration is expensive (California spends almost twice as much on prisons as on universities) and solitary confinement costs, on average, three times as much per inmate as in normal prisons. And remember: Most persons now in solitary confinement will someday be back on America’s streets, some of them rendered psychotic by what are called correctional institutions.

When solitude is torture

By George F. Will

February 21, 2013 | Washington Post

URL: http://wapo.st/ZsBSID

'Invisible Men': Overlooked black inmates

My goodness, what an oversight: 

[Professor of sociology Becky] Pettit realised that many surveys conducted by government agencies exclude people in the prison population from their research and findings. When Pettit added them in, she found that it dramatically altered the picture of the status of black America, as the number of black Americans in jail is disproportionately high. About half of the 2.3 million people in US prisons are black.

[...]  When prisoners are included, the employment rate for young black men who have dropped out of school sinks from an already low 42% to 26%.  

[...]  "We have developed a distorted view of how black Americans are faring in our society," Pettit said. The reason given for this in Pettit's work is the high rate of incarceration of black Americans. The rate is so steep that government estimates suggest that eventually one in three of all black male adults will spend some time in prison if current trends continue.

So why are so many black men locked up? The failed War on Drugs:

In the 1930s, blacks were three times more likely to be incarcerated than whites, but the figure now is seven times more likely. Some experts put this down to the "war on drugs", which has affected black communities far more than others, seeing increased arrests of blacks, often for non-violent offences. "There is no evidence that drug use is dramatically different by race or ethnicity, but the pattern of arrests is very different," said Ernest Drucker, author of a recent book, A Plague of Prisons.

Barack Obama's presidency 'has not helped cause of black people in US'

By Paul Harris

October 13, 2012 | Observer

URL: http://gu.com/p/3b4pb

Taxpayers pay twice for prison slave labor

[HT: Colbert Report, citing FoxNews].  Prison labor costs only 23 cents an hour, but this government-owned slaveholder company, UNICOR, still sells its uniforms to the U.S. military for more than its private-sector competitors, thanks to its quota from Congress, and it pockets the difference.  Nice work if you can get it.

UNICOR (previously Federal Prison Industries) even makes Patriot missiles!

All it takes to keep this Military-Industrial Slave Complex running is a perverse justice system that throws 1 out of every 31 U.S. adults -- 70 percent of them minorities -- in for-profit prisons, about 20 percent on harmless drugs convictions, costing taxpayers an average of $32,000 per inmate a year, and a Congressional quota. (And before my teabagger friends even ask, the answer is yes: $32 K is way more than inmates would get on welfare, not to mention the cost of police, interdiction, courts, etc.).

American prison labor means longer unemployment lines

By Elizabeth Prann

September 16, 2012 | FoxNews

URL: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/09/16/american-prison-labor-means-longer-unemployment-lines/#ixzz28DKCcsHN

Western hypocrisy on Pussy Riot

Indeed, hypocrisy can be pretty hypocritical sometimes.  Britain has no constitution therefore no constitutional protection of free speech.  And even in the U.S., accredited journalists are arrested with impunity simply for doing their job.  Check it out here.

By the way, the punk performance in an Orthodox Church during services was not the first time one of the Pussy Riot girls, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, engaged in some shocking political theater in an unexpected and inappropriate place, as The Exiled reminds us.

Well, at least it was in a biology museum, not a church.

The west's hypocrisy over Pussy Riot is breathtaking

By Simon Jenkins

August 21, 2012 | Guardian

URL: http://gu.com/p/39qap

Gulag USA

Those socialist regimes of the past were so brutal and awful.  In the U.S. we have the 13th Amendment that would never allow us to force our citizens into slave labor camps....  Oops:

All told, nearly a million [U.S.] prisoners are now making office furniture, working in call centers, fabricating body armor, taking hotel reservations, working in slaughterhouses or manufacturing textiles, shoes and clothing, while getting paid somewhere between ninety-three cents and $4.73 per day.

Well, at least they're privately-run slave labor camps.  With private outsourcing, I'm sure we can improve on the efficiency of socialist gulags.

Locking Down an American Workforce

By Steve Fraser and Joshua Freeman

April 19, 2012 | The Nation

URL:  http://www.thenation.com/article/167473/locking-down-american-workforce

Why does America lock so many people up?

This is really a must-read article, a real revelation for those on the "left" and "right" sides of the crime & prison debate. But it's long so I'll quote excerpts. Let's start with the shocking, shameful stats:

"More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under 'correctional supervision' in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.

"The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education."

Think about that. I regard the Soviet Union with horror; it was a giant murder mill and prisoner factory spanning a dozen time zones. And yet, according to Gopnik, today's America is in an important way even worse. How is that possible in the country that defeated Communism? How have we let ourselves get so bad?

And then there is prison rape. We all know about it. We joke about it, or fear it, or try to ignore it, or sometimes say (cruelly) that it is just punishment. Here's what Gopnik has to say:

"Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized."

There are two theories for how the modern U.S. prison system came into being (and let's remember it's a fairly new institution, compared to what we had before): a result of Northern efficiency and procedural justice without room for judges to make commonsense, common law rulings; or a continuation of the Southern slave plantation by other means. Regarding that latter theory, writes Gopnik:

"'American prisons trace their lineage not only back to Pennsylvania penitentiaries but to Texas slave plantations.' White supremacy is the real principle, this thesis holds, and racial domination the real end. In response to the apparent triumphs of the sixties, mass imprisonment became a way of reimposing Jim Crow. Blacks are now incarcerated seven times as often as whites. 'The system of mass incarceration works to trap African Americans in a virtual (and literal) cage,' the legal scholar Michelle Alexander writes. Young black men pass quickly from a period of police harassment into a period of 'formal control' (i.e., actual imprisonment) and then are doomed for life to a system of 'invisible control.' Prevented from voting, legally discriminated against for the rest of their lives, most will cycle back through the prison system. The system, in this view, is not really broken; it is doing what it was designed to do. Alexander's grim conclusion: 'If mass incarceration is considered as a system of social control—specifically, racial control—then the system is a fantastic success.'"

And then there is the more recent phenomenon of for-profit U.S. prisons, run as corporations, whose only source of growth, perversely, is more and more inmates:

"It's hard to imagine any greater disconnect between public good and private profit: the interest of private prisons lies not in the obvious social good of having the minimum necessary number of inmates but in having as many as possible, housed as cheaply as possible. No more chilling document exists in recent American life than the 2005 annual report of the biggest of these firms, the Corrections Corporation of America. Here the company (which spends millions lobbying legislators) is obliged to caution its investors about the risk that somehow, somewhere, someone might turn off the spigot of convicted men:

"'Our growth is generally dependent upon our ability to obtain new contracts to develop and manage new correctional and detention facilities. . . . The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws. For instance, any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them.'"

Gopnik goes on to describe how falling crime rates -- about a 40 percent decline in crime throughout the Western world in the 1990s -- cannot be explained by increased incarceration; the numbers so far defy easy explanation. But New York City is a different story: its crime rate decreased 80 percent. Why? Not for the reasons often cited. New York is not richer or whiter than it was, in fact, it is twice as black and Hispanic today compared to 1961. Nor did "broken-window" policing do it:

"In the nineties, the N.Y.P.D. began to control crime not by fighting minor crimes in safe places but by putting lots of cops in places where lots of crimes happened— 'hot-spot policing.' The cops also began an aggressive, controversial program of 'stop and frisk'— 'designed to catch the sharks, not the dolphins,' as Jack Maple, one of its originators, described it—that involved what's called pejoratively 'profiling.' This was not so much racial, since in any given neighborhood all the suspects were likely to be of the same race or color, as social, involving the thousand small clues that policemen recognized already. Minority communities, [researcher Franklin E.] Zimring emphasizes, paid a disproportionate price in kids stopped and frisked, and detained, but they also earned a disproportionate gain in crime reduced. 'The poor pay more and get more' is Zimring's way of putting it."

"Zimring said, in a recent interview, 'Remember, nobody ever made a living mugging. There's no minimum wage in violent crime.' In a sense, he argues, it's recreational, part of a life style: 'Crime is a routine behavior; it's a thing people do when they get used to doing it.' And therein lies its essential fragility. Crime ends as a result of 'cyclical forces operating on situational and contingent things rather than from finding deeply motivated essential linkages.' Conservatives don't like this view because it shows that being tough doesn't help; liberals don't like it because apparently being nice doesn't help, either. Curbing crime does not depend on reversing social pathologies or alleviating social grievances; it depends on erecting small, annoying barriers to entry."

And what about NYC's rate of incarceration?

"'New York City, in the midst of a dramatic reduction in crime, is locking up a much smaller number of people, and particularly of young people, than it was at the height of the crime wave,' Zimring observes. Whatever happened to make street crime fall, it had nothing to do with putting more men in prison."

And these facts lead Gopnik to the inevitable but "radical" conclusion that:

"...since prison plays at best a small role in stopping even violent crime, very few people, rich or poor, should be in prison for a nonviolent crime. Neither the streets nor the society is made safer by having marijuana users or peddlers locked up, let alone with the horrific sentences now dispensed so easily. For that matter, no social good is served by having the embezzler or the Ponzi schemer locked in a cage for the rest of his life, rather than having him bankrupt and doing community service in the South Bronx for the next decade or two."

Gopnik admits this goes against our current "common sense" and even a lot of "liberal" studies on crime prevention:

"To read the literature on crime before it dropped is to see the same kind of dystopian despair we find in the new literature of punishment: we'd have to end poverty, or eradicate the ghettos, or declare war on the broken family, or the like, in order to end the crime wave. The truth is, a series of small actions and events ended up eliminating a problem that seemed to hang over everything. There was no miracle cure, just the intercession of a thousand smaller sanities. Ending sentencing for drug misdemeanors, decriminalizing marijuana, leaving judges free to use common sense (and, where possible, getting judges who are judges rather than politicians)—many small acts are possible that will help end the epidemic of imprisonment as they helped end the plague of crime."

This should give us all hope. And it should serve as an example that systemic change does not necessarily result from "changing the whole system," but rather from small, high-leverage interventions which turn self-reinforcing vicious cycles backwards, turning them into virtuous ones.

The Caging of America

Why do we lock up so many people?

By Adam Gopnik

January 30, 2012 | New Yorker

URL: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/01/30/120130crat_atlarge_gopnik#ixzz1mLBdX85S

Man robs $1 to get health care in jail

Do I really need to explain how this is a sign of the times?

N.C. Man Allegedly Robs Bank of $1 to Get Health Care in Jail

By Katie Moisse

June 20, 2011 | ABC News

URL: http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Wellness/nc-man-allegedly-robs-bank-health-care-jail/story?id=13887040

USA! USA! We're #1!

In your face, China!


Record-High Ratio of Americans in Prison
By N.C. Aizenman
February 28, 2008 | The Washington Post

More than one in 100 adults in the United States is in jail or prison, an all-time high that is costing state governments nearly $50 billion a year, in addition to more than $5 billion spent by the federal government, according to a report released today.

With more than 2.3 million people behind bars at the start of 2008, the United States leads the world in both the number and the percentage of residents it incarcerates, leaving even far more populous China a distant second, noted the report by the nonpartisan Pew Center on the States.

The ballooning prison population is largely the result of tougher state and federal sentencing imposed since the mid-1980s. Minorities have been hit particularly hard: One in nine black men age 20 to 34 is behind bars. For black women age 35 to 39, the figure is one in 100, compared with one in 355 white women in the same age group.

While studies generally find that imprisoning more offenders reduces crime, the effect is influenced by changes in the unemployment rate, wages, the ratio of police officers to residents, and the share of young people in the population.

In addition, when it comes to preventing repeat offenses by nonviolent criminals -- who make up about half of the incarcerated population -- alternative punishments such as community supervision and mandatory drug counseling that are far less expensive may prove just as or more effective than jail time.

Florida, which nearly doubled its prison population over the past 15 years, has experienced a smaller drop in crime than New York, which, after a brief increase, reduced its number of inmates to below the 1993 level.

"There is no question that putting violent and chronic offenders behind bars lowers the crime rate and provides punishment that is well deserved," said Adam Gelb, director of the Pew Center's Public Safety Performance Project and one of the study's authors. "On the other hand, there are large numbers of people behind bars who could be supervised in the community safely and effectively at a much lower cost -- while also paying taxes, paying restitution to their victims, and paying child support."

About 91 percent of incarcerated adults are under state or local jurisdiction, and the report documents the tradeoffs state governments have faced as they have devoted ever larger shares of their budgets to house them. For instance, over the past two decades, state spending on corrections (adjusted for inflation) increased by 127 percent, while spending on higher education rose by 21 percent. For every dollar Virginia spends on higher education, it now spends about 60 cents on corrections. Maryland spends 74 cents on corrections per higher-education dollar.

Despite reaching its latest milestone, the nation's incarcerated population has actually been growing far more slowly since 2000 than during the 1990s, when the spate of harsher sentencing laws began to take effect. These included a 1986 federal law mandating prison terms for crack cocaine offenses that were up to eight times as long as for those involving powder cocaine. In the early 1990s, states across the nation adopted "three-strikes-you're-out" laws and curtailed the discretion parole boards have in deciding when to release an inmate. As a result, between 1990 and 2000, the prison population swelled by about 80 percent, increasing by as much as 86,000 per year.

By contrast, from 2007 to 2008, the prison population increased by 25,000 -- a 2 percent rise. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has issued decisions giving judges more leeway under mandatory sentencing laws, and a number of states, including Texas, are seeking to reduce their incarcerated population by adopting alternative punishments.

"Some of these [measures] would have been unthinkable five years ago," noted Gelb. "But the bottom line is that states have to balance their budgets.

U.S. Imprisons More People Than Any Other Nation - USA! USA!

Land of the Free? Home of the Brave? Well, you probably have to be brave in prison, or else you end up as somebody's butt boy....

U.S. Imprisons More People Than Any Other Nation

By James Vicini, Reuters

WASHINGTON (Dec. 9) -- Tough sentencing laws, record numbers of drug offenders and high crime rates have contributed to the United States having the largest prison population and the highest rate of incarceration in the world, according to criminal justice experts.

A U.S. Justice Department report released on November 30 showed that a record 7 million people -- or one in every 32 American adults -- were behind bars, on probation or on parole at the end of last year. Of the total, 2.2 million were in prison or jail.

According to the International Center for Prison Studies at King's College in London, more people are behind bars in the United States than in any other country. China ranks second with 1.5 million prisoners, followed by Russia with 870,000. [Good company! -- J]

The U.S. incarceration rate of 737 per 100,000 people in the highest, followed by 611 in Russia and 547 for St. Kitts and Nevis. In contrast, the incarceration rates in many Western industrial nations range around 100 per 100,000 people.

Groups advocating reform of U.S. sentencing laws seized on the latest U.S. prison population figures showing admissions of inmates have been rising even faster than the numbers of prisoners who have been released.

"The United States has 5 percent of the world's population and 25 percent of the world's incarcerated population. We rank first in the world in locking up our fellow citizens," said Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance, which supports alternatives in the war on drugs.

"We now imprison more people for drug law violations than all of western Europe, with a much larger population, incarcerates for all offenses."

Ryan King, a policy analyst at The Sentencing Project, a group advocating sentencing reform, said the United States has a more punitive criminal justice system than other countries.

More People to Prison

"We send more people to prison, for more different offenses, for longer periods of time than anybody else," he said.

Drug offenders account for about 2 million of the 7 million in prison, on probation or parole, King said, adding that other countries often stress treatment instead of incarceration.

Commenting on what the prison figures show about U.S. society, King said various social programs, including those dealing with education, poverty, urban development, health care and child care, have failed.

"There are a number of social programs we have failed to deliver. There are systemic failures going on," he said. "A lot of these people then end up in the criminal justice system."

Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in California, said the high prison numbers represented a proper response to the crime problem in the United States. Locking up more criminals has contributed to lower crime rates, he said.

"The hand-wringing over the incarceration rate is missing the mark," he said.

Scheidegger said the high prison population reflected cultural differences, with the United States having far higher crimes rates than European nations or Japan. "We have more crime. More crime gets you more prisoners."

Julie Stewart, president of the group Families Against Mandatory Minimums, cited the Justice Department report and said drug offenders are clogging the U.S. justice system.

"Why are so many people in prison? Blame mandatory sentencing laws and the record number of nonviolent drug offenders subject to them," she said.

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