Proud To Be An American
Aside from starting wars we have another exemplary talent:
The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations.
Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say they are mystified and appalled by the number and length of American prison sentences.
Once upon a time the US had a prison system admired and studied around the world. Today?
“Far from serving as a model for the world, contemporary America is viewed with horror,” James Q. Whitman, a specialist in comparative law at Yale, wrote last year in Social Research. “Certainly there are no European governments sending delegations to learn from us about how to manage prisons.”
One reason, of course, is that we're a very violent society - violent crimes are quadruple that of Western Europe. But another reason is that we chuck people in prison for even relatively minor offenses:
People who commit nonviolent crimes in the rest of the world are less likely to receive prison time and certainly less likely to receive long sentences. The United States is, for instance, the only advanced country that incarcerates people for minor property crimes like passing bad checks, Mr. Whitman wrote.
And, it should go without saying, we have the War on Drugs™ about which which one critic says, "The U.S. pursues the war on drugs with an ignorant fanaticism."
So what is it that leads to especially punitive and long prison sentences? One idea:
Mr. Whitman, who has studied Tocqueville’s work on American penitentiaries, was asked what accounted for America’s booming prison population.“Unfortunately, a lot of the answer is democracy — just what Tocqueville was talking about,” he said. “We have a highly politicized criminal justice system.”
Left unsaid is that if judicial punishment is subject to the whims of popular opinion it ceases to be justice and becomes merely revenge - the opposite of justice.
And another point left unsaid: Profit. With the rise of privatized prisons any reduction in inmates necessarily means a reduction in corporate profits. This being the United States we simply can't have that, can we? So it's only good business sense to lock people up.
It's the American Way.
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