Hear ye, hear ye: U.S. is number one in prisons!
Wednesday, May 14, 2008 at 2:05AM ARTICLE: "Inmate Count In U.S. Dwarfs Other Nations': Tough Laws and Long Terms Create Gap," by Adam Liptak, New York Times, 23 April 2008, p. A1.
We are five percent of global population but house almost one-quarter of prisoners, but that fits our share of garbage, pollution, energy use, GDP production, etc., so hardly a shocker.
Bigger problem is that we produce more ex-cons that anybody on planet, and that's bad for business. As so many are minor drug offenders, this is wasteful and pointless. Better to medicalize the solution than stalk functional illiterates in droves and stick them in prison for several years.
China has 4X our population but only 1.6 million in prison compared to our 2.3 million.
We are a "rogue state" says one criminologist.
Some states get it right, though. Minnesota looks like Sweden, whereas Texas is just this side of Russia.
Over 50 percent of our fed prisoners are there for drugs! That's just nutty. For $75k a year, I can spend that money on the guy better and still have plenty left over.
Reader Comments (17)
I must say that this is an improvement from previous years when they always complained that there were more people going to prison at the same time that crime was going down. This year they have this quote in the article:
From 1981 to 1996, according to Justice Department statistics, the risk of punishment rose in the United States and fell in England. The crime rates predictably moved in the opposite directions, falling in the United States and rising in England.
“These figures,” Mr. Cassell wrote, “should give one pause before too quickly concluding that European sentences are appropriate.”
Other commentators were more definitive. “The simple truth is that imprisonment works,” wrote Kent Scheidegger and Michael Rushford of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in The Stanford Law and Policy Review. “Locking up criminals for longer periods reduces the level of crime. The benefits of doing so far offset the costs.”
Congratulations to the New York Times. It is not impossible for them to learn.
China has a lower incarceration rate than the United States because they execute a lot of people for crimes that might get somebody a five year sentence in the US. Often, the organs of the condemned prisoners are then made available for transplantation. While I might vote for such a policy to be implemented, I am not sure how much popular support it would be likely to get in this country and, as the article points out, the US has tough law enforcement and long sentences because that is what the American people want and, unlike Europe, our democracy functions to give people what they want.
I saw my first drug overdose victim when I was a rookie policeman. I walked into a dark hallway in an abandoned building and there on the stairway sat a dead man. The hypo was still in his left arm, his right hand lay in his lap where it had dropped after he had pushed the plunger. We found three more in the next two days. A "hot" load had come in and the quality was so much better than the local dealers were used to that they failed to "step on it" enough to dilute it. The dealers did not want to kill their customers any more than the tobacco companies or the liquor distributors.
As a Homicide Detective, I handled the occasional overdose death. The hard part was dealing with the families. They had been dreading the day when the police would knock on the door with the inevitable news.
I was in the thick of it when I was assigned to the Drug Enforcement Administration as a member of an elite Task Force Unit. We recovered more guns, more cash and more dope than any other group (squad) in the United States. We worked on the big smuggling rings that brought the drugs in from Mexico. We sent a lot of bad guys to prison. These were criminals. I saw them as enemies of my country.
So what did we accomplish? Well, we have our pensions now and I do a lot of sailing. Other wise.....let me give you an example. We made a "record seizure" big time stuff. We found 30 lbs of heroin in a secret compartment of a truck. Just before I retired, one of my old partners from the FBI Drug Task Force, had seized a ton of cocaine. From 30 lbs to a ton in fifteen years. Some progress!
You don't end up in a Federal Prison for selling "Skittles." This is a complicated business. Pay attention to what is happening in Mexico right now. The head of the National Police was just assassinated in Mexico City. The Mexican Army has "invaded" the Baja in an effort to regain control of the Mexican side of our mutual border. There was a shootout in broad daylight in Tijuana. Thirteen dead. Fifteen hundred expended shell casings recovered at the scene. Many of the dead were Mexican law enforcement officers. Unfortunately, it was not a "police action". It was a gun battle between drug dealers and the dead policemen were members of the opposing gangs.
Don't think for one minute that it can't happen here.
Is the Criminal-Justice System Racist?No: the high percentage of blacks behind bars reflects crime rates, not bigotry.By Heather McDonald
http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_2_criminal_justice_system.html
http://www.whitehousedrugpolicy.gov/publications/whos_in_prison_for_marij/beyond_the_claims.pdf
Thank you for your service. It seems you are in support of Mark in Texas and, at the same time, Dr. Barnett.
Is your bottom line that prohibition does not work but "war on drugs" money and incarceration money for non-violent drug users and peddlers would be better spend on rehabilitation and preventative education as in Sweden and Minnesota? Does not the black market facilitate the violence in Mexico and America?
For violent offenders, lock them up for the public good. Fix the long term problem with policies that actually work. Why did Prohibition of Alcohol teach us nothing at all?
but seriously, thanks for commenting from your expertise.
When they pulled me off the street and stuck me in a staff job, I tried to make sense of it all. They gave me a team of eight Detectives, all of whom were experts in their fields. The last four week days of each month three additional computer guys were assigned to my unit. We studied, we tweaked, and analyzed. Here are a few of the things we found.
Street gangs control the sale of narcotics in all major cities. They sell on street corners or in front of a building or house they control. We call these spots "Major Points of Sale". A Major Point of Sale can generate...hold on to your hats...$30,000 to $33,000 dollars a day in gross revenues. If a gang controls ten Major Points of Sale, well you do the math. So this is where the violence comes in. I have seen men killed over half a sandwich, so you can imagine what people will do for a spot that coughs up thirty grand a day. They do battle over these drug sale corners with Mac Tens, AK 47s, AR 15s and anything else that theu can get their hands on.
So, how do they get all this dope? How does it get into the country? Why can't we stop it?
How do these street gangs get their hands on such powerful weaponry?
Who is buying the dope?
If I could have chosen a country to invade, I would have invaded Columbia. It has done more damage to the United States of America than Russia, North Korea, Somalia or Iraq. But, I digress...
When I was doing my research and writing my "White Paper" for the Police Department, I tried to get a handle on the number of addicts that we had in Chicago. I could not get a number from anyone. I could not get a figure for the number of addicts in the U.S.
I remember the cheering and yelling when Pablo was killed. Yes, I had a drink that night to the really, really brave Columbian soldiers and policemen who fought that SOB and finally got him. But, nothing has changed since.
Billions are spent in an attempt to secure our borders. Drugs pour in despite all our efforts.
Once in the US, drugs make it to the major cities where they become the life blood of street gangs. The revenue from drug sales goes into the neighborhoods where the gangs rule. It takes about twenty one young men (seven a shift, three shifts a day) to keep a Major Point of Sale going twenty four hours. That is a lot of money going into a very depressed area. It's a dirty little secret that no one wants to talk about.
If there was a big red button on the President's desk, and he could push that button, and stop all the drugs from getting into the country, I would strongly suggest that we get all the National Guardsmen back from Iraq. If the drugs stop...the money stops. Then my friends, the stuff will hit the fan.
interesting that both you and Steven (Freakonomics) Leavitt have studied the economics of drugs in Chicago. have you read his work?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMnk7lh9M3o
While your experience is interesting, finding your solution is proving elusive. It seems you would recommend stopping drugs coming from the gap but even in the US meth labs, pot growing houses & plots of land, etc., go as covert as possible and continute to operate. You point out that stopping the drugs would stop the money going to gangs so gangs would diversify to other activities and the shXt would really hit the fan, even more, for law abiding citizens. Maybe gang successes would start to be reversed if drugs were legalized.
It seems that legalizing and REDUCING the DEMAND for drugs, through education and rehabilitation, is the only way to dry up the violent black market and reduce our prisoner numbers. I think this goes to Barnett's point, about Sweden and Minnesota "doing it right". With minimal or no demand for drugs, the illegal supply would fade away. Prohibition does not work, or promote freedom.