America’s legal system is like a retarded mule
If we learned anything from The Wire, it’s that the Drug War is totally insane. Which we already sort of knew.
But then we hear stories like this, and we realize that the rest of the country still hasn’t figured it out.
The United States is home to less than five percent of the world’s population – but almost a quarter of the world’s prison population. We have more prisoners than anyplace else in the world, both in terms of percentage and sheer numbers.
We’re talking about 2.3 million Americans behind US bars; China, with four times our population, is a distant second, with 1.6 million prisoners.
Worse, in the 1980s we had about 40,000 people in jail for drug crimes; today, it’s over half a million.
The NY Times‘ national legal correspondant, Adam Liptak, spoke with NPR’s Fresh Air yesterday. Author of the Times’ recent series of legal criticism, “The American Exception,” Liptak tries to make sense of the ridiculously unbalanced political system we’ve got going on – and figure out why we’ve got more people in prison than any other country in the world.
Surprise, surprise — the problem’s our law enforcement, legal and judicial systems… not our people.
Of course, the craziest part (and the real reason we’re all getting arrested at higher and higher rates) is the American prison-industrial complex. Prisons are used as manufacturing facilities, with prisoners working as free labor, and prisons becoming privatized commercial enterprises (bought and sold on the stock market, and more concerned with effective business practices than prisoner rehabilitation).
Since our law enforcement is still noticably racist in practise (Sean Bell who?), we wind up with prisons full of young black men, working as unpaid labor, under armed guard. Does this sound familiar? 200 years and the only thing that’s different is the name we’re calling it by.
Point is, with all the money being made by prison privatization, and with all the money being funnelled from the prison industry into state and federal lobbyists, the government actually has a major incentive to keep locking more and more folks up.
It’s not like the Egyptians ever sat back and said, “Well, we’ve got enough free labor. Let’s give it a rest after this pyramid.” Why should we expect our government to act any better, right?
Yeah…. Anyhow, you’ve got to hear this interview.
