Gulag nation

[medicinal]

AlterNet: Home Jailing Nation: How Did Our Prison System Become Such a Nightmare?[/SIZE]

By Daniel Lazare, The Nation. Posted August 20, 2007.

With five percent of the world's population, the U.S. has close to a quarter of the world's prisoners. How did the American criminal justice system go so wrong?
How can you tell when a democracy is dead? When concentration camps spring up and everyone shivers in fear? Or is it when concentration camps spring up and no one shivers in fear because everyone knows they're not for "people like us" (in Woody Allen's marvelous phrase) but for the others, the troublemakers, the ones you can tell are guilty merely by the color of their skin, the shape of their nose or their social class?

Questions like these are unavoidable in the face of America's homegrown gulag archipelago, a vast network of jails, prisons and "supermax" tombs for the living dead that, without anyone quite noticing, has metastasized into the largest detention system in the advanced industrial world. The proportion of the US population languishing in such facilities now stands at 737 per 100,000, the highest rate on earth and some five to twelve times that of Britain, France and other Western European countries or Japan. With 5 percent of the world's population, the United States has close to a quarter of the world's prisoners, which, curiously enough, is the same as its annual contribution to global warming.

With 2.2 million people behind bars and another 5 million on probation or parole, it has approximately 3.2 percent of the adult population under some form of criminal-justice supervision, which is to say one person in thirty-two. For African-Americans, the numbers are even more astonishing. By the mid-1990s, 7 percent of black males were behind bars, while the rate of imprisonment for black males between the ages of 25 and 29 now stands at one in eight.

While conservatives have spent the past three or four decades bemoaning the growth of single-parent families, there is a very simple reason some 1.5 million American children are fatherless or (less often) motherless: Their parents are locked up. Because they are confined for the most part in distant rural prisons, moreover, only about one child in five gets to visit them as often as once a month.[/COLOR]

medicinal Reviewed by medicinal on 08-21-2007. Gulag nation AlterNet: Home Jailing Nation: How Did Our Prison System Become Such a Nightmare? By Daniel Lazare, The Nation. Posted August 20, 2007. With five percent of the world's population, the U.S. has close to a quarter of the world's prisoners. How did the American criminal justice system go so wrong? How can you tell when a democracy is dead? When concentration camps spring up and everyone shivers in fear? Or is it when concentration camps spring up and no one shivers in fear because Rating: 5

[fishman3811]

I read an interesting fact that 9 out of 10 black males under 25 years of age in Washington D.C are in prison or been in prison or on probation.

[medicinal]

In DC, they are definently living on dead end streets. Whereas Millionaires walk the halls of congress and cruise the avenues around the capital in limos and armored SUVs, the forgotten black citizens of DC are left to scramble for crumbs. In fact, our nations capital is in most years, the leader in crimes per capita, and thats not even counting the crimes by our elected officials.

[fishman3811]

Yeah and this war on drugs doesnt help.But hey you guys are short on cannon fodder i mean troops so why not recruit people in prison?Thats better than a draft isnt it?

[Gandalf_The_Grey]

Yeah and this war on drugs doesnt help.But hey you guys are short on cannon fodder i mean troops so why not recruit people in prison?Thats better than a draft isnt it?

Man you're not actually serious right? They're in prison. Deployment would just be an opportunity for escape. More importantly though you'd be taking the scum of society, the rapists, thieves, gansters etc. and letting them loose on Iraqi civilians. Just imagine the amount of civilian abuse that would go on, it's bad enough as is.


As for Medicinal's original post; I'm surprised how little this subject is discussed in mainstream media. Americans are always telling us how they live in the best country on Earth.... well then what's wrong with their best society on Earth when they have to imprison WAAAAYYY more people than any other nation including communist China and any other dictatorship where people can go to jail for thinking the wrong thoughts or spitting gum on the sidewalks.
Honestly I think the military and police has a lot to do with it. Trillions of dollars spent on policing the world and locking up citizens for using substances, which as is should be a public health issue, not a criminal one. It baffles me that Americans are so concerned with who they should be afraid of, inside the nation and out, that the living standards of the very people Washington is governing is seldom the top issue.
All our elections here in Canada have been about what the government does for its people, the most hotbutton issues being healthcare, environment, economy, crime, and drug policy. The Liberals got voted out for doing diddly squat about these issues, not for failing to invade enough nations and lock up enough "criminals".

[MistaDobalina]

In DC, they are definently living on dead end streets. Whereas Millionaires walk the halls of congress and cruise the avenues around the capital in limos and armored SUVs, the forgotten black citizens of DC are left to scramble for crumbs. In fact, our nations capital is in most years, the leader in crimes per capita, and thats not even counting the crimes by our elected officials.

thats true baltimore and DC are tough places to live.