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Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce
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I glanced through the 42 page pdf and that thing is a shocker! The problem is that no one wants to read even 42 words these days - never mind pages. Some hack for some poorly written rag races through the material (apparently after having a few drinks or a few too many hits or whatever, and comes up with a "Reader's Digest Condensed Story" that would put even that sorry publication to shame. Here is one actual quote from the REAL pdf that dismayed me - probably because I seem to keep reading and hearing the same following facts and wishing they were false. They don't appear to be so far:
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By any measure, the United States leads the world in incarceration. In absolute terms, it has more prisoners than any other country. With just 5 percent of the world’s population, we have almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners. China, with nearly 20
percent of the world’s population, has 16 percent of the world’s prisoners. Incarceration rates were not always this high in the United States. For the first three-quarters of the twentieth century, the rate was well under 250 per 100,000.88 Then, starting around 1980, incarceration rates started rising sharply with the advent of the war on drugs, mandatory minimum sentences and three-strikes laws.
The difference in incarceration rates cannot be explained by higher crime rates in the United States. Crime rates here are roughly equivalent to Canada and in many categories lower than other countries. And the crime rate has been dropping in the
United States, as in many other industrialized nations. Yet, U.S. sentences are vastly, shockingly longer than just about anywhere else in the world.
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The War on Drugs has had had more ill effects on this country than just about anything else except slavery and it's on-going legacy of racism. But that's for another post. Folks who are interested and have a little time should take a look at that shocking pdf. Thank you Bruce for providing it.
07-10-2015, 03:21 AM
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